h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have a rather urgent question:
What, exactly, are paperclips made of? The normal, metal ones, I mean. Because I have observed that certain varieties get little sparkly things all over your hands when you try to bend them into earrings, and I wondered whether those are toxic. Similarly, when I spent several hours last year making long chains of interestingly bent paperclips (of a different variety - the kind that stains one's hands gray rather than losing sparkly things), I felt rather...interesting. Do paper clips cause brain damage? Is it harmful to wear them through your ears like earrings? What about eating off of them?

The sparkly stuff is most likely due to your clips being chromed, and the gray stains are metal oxide and/or dirt. Everything is harmful if you ingest large enough amounts and I'm no toxologist, so I won't attempt to tell you when you need to worry, but unless you eat several boxes or straighten the pins and show them into your brain I don't think you'll suffer braindamage. On the other hand I wouldn't use them as earrings. Stuffing unknown alloys into holes in your body is a good way to get allergies.