From orange foam to Balenciaga ‘ear jewels’: How self-care-obsessed Gen Zers are making earplugs cool

Jennifer Fishburn grew up constantly going to concerts in the ’90s, from Lollapalooza to Woodstock ’99, and she kept an unexpected — and unwanted — souvenir from all of them.

The 49-year-old suffers from tinnitus, or “ringing in the ears,” a result of being a concert regular.

“Now that I’m older, I don’t need to be up front and in the pit,” Fishburn, a Pennsylvania nurse whose first concert was Heart at age 9, told The Post. “But when you were younger, you always wanted to be right up front, right by the speakers and everything.”

She never bothered to wear earplugs in her pit heyday — at the time, they were social suicide.

“The earplugs way back then were those neon orange ones that were foam,” recalled Fishburn, who still forgoes earplugs despite frequenting shows. “Nobody wants to be seen with those in your ears.”

The times, however, have changed.