Salt Lake Designer Offers Unique Living Cockroach Jewelry

If you love jewelry and you love insects you're in luck. Local fashion designer Jared Gold has both available at his Black Chandelier store in Trolley Square.

Gold sells crystal studded brooches made from living Madagascar hissing cockroaches.

"They're Austrian Swarovski crystals and they come in all sorts of colors and each roach has his little pattern on them so they're all individual" says the avant garde designer.

Gold says his company buys insects from a breeder in Los Angeles. A co-worker actually sticks the crystals to the back of every bug. Its a painstaking task that involves what he calls, "a secret process."

They go for forty dollars each, and Gold says they're selling like hotcakes. But, what will animals rights activists say?

Gold says, "It's funny everybody asks that and the reality is...to PETA, it's just a bug, they're vermin really and we just kind give them a new texture. What we do to them in no way injures them or harms them. They live very great lives eating really good food and riding around on fabulous people."

Gold has been selling the roaches since last October, but he says a lot of people bought the bugs during Christmas.