The oldest ornament of the Nayar women is the necklace called nagapatam, the pendants of which resemble a cobra's hood. The Nayar women wear no ornament on the head, but decorate the hair with flowers. The nagapatam, and several other forms of neck ornament, such as kazhultila, nalupanti, puttali, chelakkamotiram, amatali, arumpumani, and kumilatali are fast vanishing. The kuttu-minnu is worn on the neck for the first time by a girl when her tali-kettu is celebrated. This ornament is also called gnali. Prior to the tali-kettu ceremony, the girls wear a kasu or sovereign. The inseparable neck ornament of a Nayar woman in modern days is the addiyal, to which a patakkam is attached. The only ornament for the ears is the takka or toda. After the lobes have been dilated at the karnavedha ceremony, and dilated, a big leaden ring is inserted in them. The nose ornament of women is called mukkuthi, from which is suspended a gold wire called gnattu. No ornament is worn in the right nostril. The wearing of gold bangles on the wrists has been long the fashion among South Indian Hindu females of almost all high castes. Round the waist Nayar women wear chains of gold and silver, and, by the wealthy, gold belts called kachchapuram are worn. Anklets were not worn in former times, but at the present day the kolusu and padasaram of the Tamilians have been adopted. So, too, the time-honoured toda is sometimes set aside in favour of the Tamil kammal, an ornament of much smaller size. Canter Visscher (who was Chaplain at Cochin in the eighteenth century) must have been much struck by the expenditure of the Nayar women on their dress, for he wrote [164] 'there is not one of any fortune who does not own as many as twenty or thirty chests full of robes made of silver and other valuable materials, for it would be a disgrace in their case to wear the same dress two or three days in succession'." It is noted by Mr. Fawcett that "the Venetian sequin, which probably first found its way to Malabar in the days of Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque, is one of those coins which, having found favour with a people, is used persistently in ornamentation long after it has passed out of currency. So fond are the Malayalis of the sequin that to this day there is quite a large trade in imitations of the coin for purposes of ornament. Such is the persistence of its use that the trade extends to brass and even copper imitation of the sequins. The former are often seen to bear the legend 'Made in Austria.' The Nayars wear none but the gold sequins. The brass imitations are worn by the women of the inferior races. If one asks the ordinary Malayali, say a Nayar, what persons are represented on the sequin, one gets for answer that they are Rama and Sita; between them a cocoanut tree."