After seeing some laser cut living hinge earrings, I thought it would be fun to do 3D printed versions. I came out with a variety of designs and even tried layering some to make them multi colored.

I used Tinkercad to make these and also have a tutorial on Instructables where I go into more detail about designing and printing them.

Instructables: https://www.instructables.com/id/Living-Hinge-Earrings/
Tinkercad: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/1GWQ0EntjiY

After testing, I came up with 7 variations I liked though there are of course many ways to do these. I found the variations where the design cuts almost all the way through each way was most flexible. The ones with cutouts in the middle aren't as flexible, but still bend enough for earrings.

I recommend you print single color (or two color if you change color halfway through) designs at about 1.2mm or 6 layers. This seems to give you the best combination of flexibility and stability. For some of the designs, I did print them up to 1/8" thick so it's possible for SOME but not for all. But when it gets this thick it gets harder to put on a jump ring and it kind of wants to flop all over.

As I mentioned, most likely you'll print this as one color and that's great, but I also found switching the color halfway through helps the design pop a bit more when bent.

For 3 or 5 color layer designs you need to be careful. I noticed the more colors I added, the more unstable the earring became and it was more likely to crease then bend well. For these ones, the base color needs to be 1mm or 5 layers at least I would say. Then the smaller colors going up only need to be .4mm or 2 layers each. The files are already designed this way but I wanted to explain them.

If you do 5 colors with a single AMS, you need to make the 1st and last color the same color and then after it finishes printing the first color, swap it out with what you want for the 5th. The color changes are done between layers.