The Girl with The Cigarette Earrings

Cows being abducted, Goldfish in a bag, Bubble-o-Bills, snow globes, jellyfish - Rose Telfer loves to wear her loud on her lobes.

Her earrings, generally trawled from the depths of the internet, have to be either “weird, funny or bloody big” before she hits the purchase button.

Probably her most attention-grabbing pair are the cigarettes, dangling totems of vice.

Particularly when Rose has a real one in her mouth at the same time.

“I just love standing out. My opinions come out with what I wear, what I say,” she says.

“The world is full of people that are all the same, so I go out of my way to find the weird. I just love being weird, that’s my thing.”

Being herself is highly encouraged at her day job.

Rose considers her lucky to be a regular at Mount Gambier café Metro where uniforms are uniformly rejected by a highly alternative pack of staff.

Multiple piercings? Face tattoos? Transitioning? Not a problem.

“Toni wants us to be who we are, that’s part of the charm of working at Metro,” Rose says.

Now she’s nearly four months pregnant, real cigarettes have been replaced by fake ones.

After all, she’s got a responsibility to “grow a really cool human” and she’s taking that seriously. 

“I’m so excited to be a parent and to raise a beautiful free-thinking strong minded child,” she says.

“If it’s a girl I want her to know she can take up as much goddamn space as she wants.”

In the meantime, until pregnancy renders her too big to waitress, she’ll wear her opinions on her ears.

“I’m still going to wear the cigarette earrings so when I’m really big, people are going to be like, ‘what the fuck?” she laughs.

“But hey baby, that’s just part of my charm.”