Body jewellery selection versus gauge

One of my favourite sites for window shopping is Bodyartforms. I'm increasingly fascinated by the idea of poking holes in myself in weird places, but I dislike the stereotypical hardware store aesthetic of stainless steel jewellery. You know, like when you see someone with twenty identical rings dangling from the helix of their ear and barbells with ends that look like ball-bearings poking out of everything else. BAF has a huge selection of amazingly pretty things that don't look like that, like titanium anodized in a rainbow of colours, semi-precious stones, glass, silicone, and organic materials like wood, bone, horn, and amber.

I got my earlobes pierced the regular way for my 14th birthday after much begging. My mum and pa were originally going to let me get them pierced for the 10th, but around that time HIV/AIDS started becoming a big concern in Malaysia. Last year I stretched them up to 14ga just for the heck of it (in the USA, body jewellery is measured in American Wire Gauge/Brown & Sharpe while outside it's measured in millimeters) using some cute spiral-shaped tapers similar to this one.

(I pierced the inner conch of my left ear with a 14ga needle but put in 16ga jewellery to heal with. Swapping it out for a 14ga stud later wasn't a problem, presumably because cartilage doesn't grow back much. It's just going to stay at that size though, since I don't want to try stretching cartilage...)

In order to determine the smallest gauge my earlobes should be at to access the maximum selection of jewellery, I made this graph of Bodyartforms' stock: As you can see, the curve flattens out at 8 ga, except for the little blip at 4. 8 is also the smallest you need to be to really wear plugs or eyelets. If my ears get that big I'm going to purchase a pair of transparent silicone eyelets in order to be able to still wear "normal" earrings also.