Gift Ideas for the Hearing Aid User on Your List

The stigma of wearing hearing aids is starting to fade. You can tell by the way so many of them now are not made to hide but to call attention to themselves. Check these out!

• Silver spandex hearing aid rocket costumes
• Hearing aid styles such as guage (large circular ear piercing), hummingbird, LCD sound visualizer, Leopard skin
• Hearing aid charms
• Adorable pixie wings
• Jewelry
• High tech gear
• Even steam punk

Seeing hearing aids as fashion statements got me thinking about stigma. In the past, having a hearing aid carried with it the stigma of incompetence. Hearing aids were made to be as unobtrusive as possible, ideally worn in the ear so that no one would know that one was wearing them at all. Obviously that's changing. 

By contrast, eyeglasses aren’t that way at all; they’ve been around so long and so many people wear them that eyeglasses are made to look fashionable and even call attention to themselves. (Think Cat Eye Glasses and Elton John.)

So what does this innovation in hearing aid fashion mean? For savvy business people, it means there’s a whole market out there waiting to be tapped. More significantly, the stigma of hearing aids is starting to fade, and that’s a good thing. Perhaps the time will come when they and other assistive devices for people will not carry stigma with them. Maybe they’ll even carry a little cool. Maybe that’s happening already. Here’s double amputee Aimee Mullens talking about the superpowers that come with her 12 pairs of legs. 

Mullens says, “The conversation with society has changed profoundly in this last decade. It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency, It’s a conversation about augmentation. It’s a conversation about potential.”

When I need hearing aids, I’m not the type for pixie wings or steam punk, but I’m jazzed about the ones styled like Leopard skin. How about that hearing aid user on your gift list?

For customer reviews of hearing aids, see Compare Reviews of Hearing Aids.