The Puppy Knuckle-Duster You Didn’t Know You Wanted

Puppies. Knuckle-dusters. Strange bedfellows, you might say. But it’s just par for the course from Vera Balyura’s jewelry line, VeraMeat, which offers vampire fangs cast in silver, gold, or copper and Zombie Queen and dinosaur-eating-fried-chicken pendants, too. There’s a cinematic aura surrounding the whole collection—a B movie bent, really—so no surprise that it’s picked up film-world fans such as Tilda Swinton, Michel Gondry, Miranda July, and Zach Galifianakis. And no surprise, much of Balyura’s inspiration comes from hanging out on movie sets when she was young. “It really shaped the way I see the world,” she explains. “I have a sort of anything-is-possible mentality. It’s like, anAlien vs. Predator pendant? Why not?” The idea for the puppy duster, meanwhile, is firmly rooted in Balyura’s current East Village reality: She just got a dog. “Her name is Fred. She’s super cute. And you know what’s cuter than one puppy?” Balyura asks. “Lots of puppies all stuck together.”

Puppy duster, $170,