Google-hunting this month was tougher than last, because of the many variant spellings of “areola” in singular and plural. The commonest by far is “aureole”, although the transitional “aureola” is not unknown. All three take their plural in either the English or the Latin “-ae” style, at whim.
But if the spellings are diverse, the clichés aren't – unsurprisingly, all are related to size. Size is erotic, and as writers quest for more and more erotic charge, we witness a kind of areolar inflation. (And as we shall see, puffiness is a definite plus. Puffy areolae are so popular (over 8,000 matches) that they even have their own web-site.)
Nipples and breasts provide a relatively rich harvest of simile, but for the areola I've dredged up only two: coinage and crockery. But these two points of comparison clearly appeal to quite different types of writer.
Crockery men are in the minority, and although they go for extravagant sizes, they like to employ minor variations in wording, perhaps hoping that this will enable them to slip through the cliché-net. While I trapped a good number of “areolae the size of saucers”, I found variants such as “tea-cup saucers”, “tea-saucers” and even “cup saucers”. The most preposterous variant is worth quoting, and not just for its faux-antique spelling and ludicrous mixture of ancient and modern phraseology:
“She stared, goggle-eyed, at her nipples, now stiff and elongated like the joynt of one's thumb, and which were surrounded by those circles of smooth brick-red skin whose name I know not, circles far larger than mine, Aunt, the size of demi-tasse saucers, at least!”
Money men are quite a different kettle of fish. Where saucer-people try to wriggle through the net, your money man cheerfully plunges straight in.
Favourite of the month is the silver dollar, with its lesser variants the half-dollar or 50 cent coin and the quarter dollar. Between them, these three coins seem to account for almost all the areolae there are: silver dollar 44%, half-dollar 35.5%, quarter 18%, nickel 1.5%. Here's a typical example:
“...Her areolas were deep brown and the size of silver dollars, covered in goose pimples. Her nipples were excited little stalks standing out an extra inch.”
Never did I find comparisons with half-crowns, 50p pieces, florins, or any other British coin past or present. (Nor, unsurprisingly, did I find any Euros!) Living in an era in which decimalization and inflation have forced successive redesigns of their coinage, perhaps British writers have been made aware just how treacherous such comparisons are apt to be. It may be called “inflation”, but the cold wind of time has an inexorable shrinking effect. Perhaps, before these familiar coins dwindle into microdots, some kindly American should produce a FAQ (or should that be SAQ?) giving their current dimensions – if not for us benighted foreigners, for the benefit of future generations. [See the responses for the next best thing.]
Some areola fans dodge simile altogether, preferring painstaking measurement to poetic imprecision. Perhaps their statistics will one day be the subject of a more methodical analysis than mine. The areolae they record for posterity are seldom as small as two inches in diameter. Three inches is more typical, and I even found one pair that were “easily five inches across”. Easily! It was a great relief when I found one author who resolutely put the tape measure back in his pocket and let our imagination do a little more work:
“...Her body was just like I remembered it, perfectly rounded and firm 34D tits capped with puffy aureoles that were quite large in diameter.”
Finally, while clicking my way through Google, I came across a passage that defies categorization. While failing to resist a well-worn nipple cliché (see April), in the areola department it steers so wide of the Scylla of of cliché that it could be said to have banged into the Charybdis of unrepeatable novelty:
“A glance down confirmed what I felt dragging down from my shoulders. They were the size of volley balls! Protruding in front and slightly upward, the dark aureoles were like someone had sliced a softball in half and implanted each half behind the thumb sized nipples that further stuck outward from their centers.”
Next month: the golden globe awards...
Beep beep!
O.