Trivia : Love Enamel Pin

"I am just a human, you erode all my edges and make me into love" 난 그냥 사람, 사람, 사람 넌 나의 모든 모서릴 잠식 나를 사랑, 사랑, 사랑 으로 만들어 만들어 [ designed feb/march 2021 ]: As an Asian American, I’ve become a lot prouder in recent years about my culture and heritage. This is something that I can greatly attribute to BTS in helping me with since it was very rare to see Asian role models growing up as a child. I used to feel a lot of shame being Asian when I was younger, shame which has developed into some form of guilt as I grew older. It was ‘shame’ in the sense that I wanted to fit in and not be ‘different’ when I was younger, to be more ‘American’ than Chinese, since I was so afraid of what others would think of me, and so I would silently keep silent about my culture and upbringing. However, it wasn’t until I entered college when I realized that there was nothing to be ashamed of, and that your culture should be something that you should embrace and not hide. Which is why I felt a lot of guilt then when I slowly started to rediscover my roots & in a sense still feel some residual guilt now. However, after much self discovery and reflection, these days, I’ve grown to simply not care about what others think of me and enjoy learning and experiencing not only my own culture, but a lot of other Asian cultures as well which largely can be thanks to BTS and the slow (somewhat) gradual acceptance of kpop into the western world.   This pin was a personal project of mine especially since I wanted to create something that would not only support the AAPI community, but also to design something representing me as a designer and have it MEAN something. Joon is known especially for wordplay, so I knew I wanted to have a wordplay pin & Trivia: Love was the perfect song to play off of. So I'm glad to have finally figured out a way to pull my design off! The design itself was heavily inspired by Joon's striped jacket with the rose decal that he wore during the Love Yourself Tour! In normal lighting, this pin represents us, normal everyday people with the Korean word for ‘person’ 사람. However when it glows in the dark, it becomes the Korean word for ‘love’, 사랑  Through countless of BTS lyrics, the recurring theme is to fill every person with love, not hate. This type of love can vary from self love, platonic love and romantic love, because love will triumph over hate. We are all people, and we are all capable of love. & so I hope that this pin will be a reminder to love yourself, and love others as well, and to let love triumph over hate. 50% of profits from this pin will be donated back to the AAPI community, total will be polled in the upcoming months and donation will be made (probably around BTS’ anniversary in June or my own birthday in July depending on if I can first make back production costs) Planning to donate to a wonderful NYC nonprofit org called Heart of Dinner. They're a wonderful group of people who make & deliver food to the elderly Asian community within NYC and often provide them with food that is not only familiar to them, but also comforting to them. As an Asian American, the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes have really hit close to home, especially since a majority of the victims were my parents’ age. Because of this I wanted to not only give back to our community, to help out the elderly, but I also wanted this pin to represent just love that we as humans should give to others and love that we should give to ourselves. Triva : Love (3 variants) 2.5 inches tall 3 variants : normal, glitter, pearl screenprint & glow in the dark $16 (normal) $17 (glitter & pearl) please note that since these are charity pins, they will be loosely graded (meaning that I won't be grading them super hard) also please note that the corner screenprint isn't an exact match to the white used on the letterings due to the glow in the dark powder, this has no impact when grading The main issue with some of these pins revolve around the white lettering. Standard grades will have an almost blemish free fill in the lettering where as B grades will have specs of black or dust in them. Some of these pins also have wobbly pin backs, but there isn't any risk of them actually falling off. Please see my pin grading page in my header for more info regarding how I grade my pins!