Over-ear headphones with enormous, pillowy ear cups wrapped in iridescent fabric — like wearing two giant pearls on either side of your head. These are circulating through mood boards and IG dumps (and Cosmos collections), but no one knows what they are. Whenever they emerge, someone’s asking where to buy them, and no one answers because no one knows. We built Cosmos on provenance, on tracing every object to its source, but even we can’t find them. That might be why we can’t stop looking at them.

The closest dupe came was Nova Products, a Munich startup that Kickstarted pearl earrings with wireless speakers hidden inside the stones. They raised €103,703, debuted at CES 2023, went insolvent before most backers got a pair. Then there’s the clam phone in It Follows — a pink shell-shaped e-reader that we’d all own if it existed. But some objects are only perfect because we can never have them. The wanting is the whole point.