For many mothers, breast-feeding as much as childbirth is an unforgettable experience that is both singular and momentous and connects mothers to their newborn children. Alicia Mogavero, a Rhode Island native, is one of these mothers and has created a way to “materialize” the memory of breast-feeding – by turning breast-milk into jewelry.
Mogavero creates and sells her breast-milk jewelry on her online store Mommy Milk Creations on Etsy.com and, for $64 to $125, she will plasticize a sample of a woman’s breast-milk into miniature shapes, such as tiny foot and hand-prints, hearts, and moons which are then preserved in resin and made into pendants and bracelets.
A mother of three, Mogavero came up with this idea after breast-feeding her own children. She told DailyMail, “You only make breast milk for such a short period and it was amazing to me that this milk that I made was able to make my child thrive as well as he was. This was simply amazing to me but the thought of him no longer nursing and be not making milk was sad in a way. I thought long and hard about a way for me to preserve the short time that I made milk.”
Women interested in Mogavero’s unique jewelry are instructed to send two tablespoons of their milk in a zip-lock bag. However, her product has now become so popular that the waiting list for the jewelry has now reached eight to ten weeks long. Besides this, Mogavero has quite a few competitors on Etsy.
Mogavero though is hardly the first to experiment with the uses of breast milk. Time Magazine notes several more adventurous endeavors. Houston’s Sara James makes bars of soap made from olive, coconut, lavender, and breastmilk sold for $60 on her online Etsy store TinRoofSoapCo and in 2011 a NYU graduate student made cheese from breast milk which was sampled at a New York gallery. In addition, that same year a London store The Icecreamists started selling ice-cream made from breast milk called “Baby Gaga.”
Source: DailyMail, Time
Images via Alicia Mogavero on Mommy Milk Creations
