Thirty years ago, the gift every teenage girl in Hawai'i wanted for Christmas was a single, shining gold-dipped maile leaf.

Why? Who knows. Stranger things have been popular, like slap bracelets and Care Bears. Perhaps a maile leaf encased in gold of suspect quality summed up Hawai'i's take on the disco age: a bit of tradition meets the gilded aesthetic, sitting boldly mid-chest above the neckline of a three-quarter sleeve T-shirt. It said, "I'm hip and I'm local. Let's boogie."

Other fashionable variations popped up. High school girls hung the leaf pendants off one side of their hoop earrings like the singer from Bow Wow Wow. On Kaua'i, stores sold gold-dipped mokihana berries. And who could forget Danny Couch and his glorious gold-dipped maile lei set off by his white suit? It wasn't an entire maile lei thrown into the vat of gold, but rather individual gold-dipped leaves assembled perfectly along a gold chain to look just like a full thigh-length maile lei. When he turned on stage to sing to a different screaming lady in the audience, all the gilded maile leaves would clatter against each other like vertical blinds on a windy day. No, more romantic than that — like a thousand little pebbles on the shore. Only Danny Couch could make that look work.

Elementary school kids took field trips to the local gold-dipping "factory," which was really just two sweaty guys in a room off an auto body shop in the light industrial area. There, the magic of gold dipping was revealed, which was to say that all the kids left disappointed that there were no actual bubbling cauldrons of gold, just a tiny container about the size of a pot you'd use to heat a can of Campbell's soup. There was a science lecture about the process that confused half the class and bored the other half. Molecules, ions, whatever. Just get to the gold-dipping part. And do we get to wear goggles?

No goggles. No free samples, either. But there was a gallery of crazy stuff the workers had dipped in gold just to see if someone was nuts enough to buy it. Gold-dipped crown flower. Gold-dipped mynah bird feather. Gold-dipped cockroaches in various poses: tennis player, golfer, surfer. The big hit was a huge gold-dipped centipede curled around itself to form a bracelet. Lots of screams over that one.

So what happened to all those gold-dipped leaves?

There was one on eBay recently with one bid for a dollar. Sad.