Decorating My Hearing Aids

  My last pair of hearing aids were bright red and I loved them.  I loved taking them off to show people and sometimes that shocked them.  No one shows off their hearing aids…except maybe me.

Weren’t they great?

Now I have a new pair and since they weren’t in wide release at that time (last summer) I got boring beige.  You have no idea how hard it was for me to accept that after having bright red ones.

So I got red ear molds.

That’s helped a little and I like that people can see them in my ear and know I’m not trying to hide them but I don’t take them off to show them to others very much.  Boring, boring beige.  Blah.

In talking about this on my SayWhatClub list, another member started blinging her hearing aids and you can read her post about that here: Does Blinging Mean Acceptance. Of course it does and I like that she does this and shares her finished product.

I had such troubles getting my hearing aids adjusted and working properly that for a long time I didn’t care they were boring beige.  I didn’t feel like talking about them anyway but once they were finally working (thanks to a new set of ear molds) I became a lot happier with my hearing aids.  Now I want to show them off so I wrote my friend and asked her for help.  She sent links:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OjifltzfzI
• https://pimpmyhearingaids.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/nail-foils-tutorial/

And I was off!  My mind whirled with possibilities and I started looking for nail foils and later fun tapes.

My first try was an attempt, getting used to my hearing aids.  For the first time ever, my behind the ear type of hearing aids are smaller than ever thanks to the receiver being in the ear but this makes blinging them difficult.  They are tiny and it’s hard to work around but not bad for a first try.

The foils  had a very acrylic smell to them while applying the.  They stayed on well, too well, and only later when I re-read things did I realize this is the wrong kind to get.  They aren’t peel off kinds but I guess polish remover foils.  I can’t use that on hearing aids so I destroyed several finger nails scraping it off hoping I didn’t ruin anything. I didn’t.  I tried another set of foils I bought and they were the peel off kinds, thankfully.

Friends said they looked like candy corn.

Weeeeeeeee!  St. Patrick’s Day was fast approaching so I went out looking for colorful tapes.  I couldn’t find straight green and the closest I could get was white and green tape from the scrap-book section of the craft store.

This certainly isn’t the best look for them and it clashed with my hearing aid molds.  People said it was more Christmas like instead. If I had known I was going to have this much fun decorating, I might have gotten clear molds so it wouldn’t clash so bad with other colors.  The tape peeled up faster which in a way was good since I was eager to move on.  This project did get me used to decorating on my tiny hearing aids a little more but I still had big ideas.

I post my new decoration projects to Facebook and we discussed the different tapes and duct tape came up.  I know there are many great colors and patterns on duct tape but another friend posted, “Take it from a drag queen, don’t use duct tape as it leaves a lot of goo to clean up.”   Darn but yes, I will take his advice.

Swinging back to red, I tried the red masking tape and the Duck Tape, metallic stars, I found near the yarn/tie dye section of the craft store.  (No, I don’t why they had tape there too.)  The Duck Tape sounded too much like duct tape and sure enough, it was a lot stickier than the masking tape.  In my mind I see all kind of design possibilities but it’s so hard to fit my ideas on my tiny hearing aids.

That’s more fun and it matches my molds again.  The masking tape worked pretty well, the metallic tape, not so much.  It is stickier and it’s also stiff which doesn’t allow for the contours of parts of the hearing aids.  The red is sticking well to the hearing aids but the metallic tape is coming off a week later in my hair but that only means it’s time to decorate again!  Practice, practice, practice.