The intriguing objects come from the museum's own collection as well as items borrowed from private collections, the Bishop Museum and the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Among the show's many highlights is L. Massard's wonderfully droll and delightful watercolor of the ali'i Namahana, c. 1830, dressed in a blousy western dress featuring an almost Elizabethan neck ruff, her head proudly topped by a traditional haku lei.

Queen Kapi'olani's elegant lei niho palaoa, made of impeccably preserved finely plaited human hair and ivory, demonstrates how ivory pendants became considerably larger after contact, due to the increased supply of whale bone from the imported whaling industry.

Mission Houses Museum Pa'e Kaha (crown), head ornament, Marquesas. Triton shell, turtle shell, pearl shell, coconut fiber. Owned by the Rev. James Kekela, a Hawaiian missionary in the Marquesas. Tricia Allen

Pieces in the ritual and ceremony category range from Hawai'i dog-teeth anklets that adorn hula dancers to Kiribati coconut-fiber armor, which was designed to protect against the culture's savage but very civilized pinpoint attacks with shark teeth-encrusted sticks.

Skilled back-strap-woven items — a technique originating in Southeast Asia and found only as far east as Ponape (Pohnpei) and Kosarae, not in the Marshalls or Palau (Belau)— are featured with the typically almost bi-chromatic muted earth tones, executed in an ikat technique, a color palette suggesting a psychological balancing mechanism to counter the riot of color found in most tropical natural environments of sky, flora and fauna.

Combs, ear pieces, leis, neck ornaments: the grammar of beauty embraces an infinite variety of expressions that adorn and attract in the displayed cultures as well as in our contemporary Americanized global village.

The exquisite jewels of the exhibition are the woodblock prints of Paul Jacoulet, done in the 1930s.

Like a kind of latter-day Gauguin, Jacoulet, a Frenchman trained in Japan in traditional woodblock techniques, created an Art Deco dream world of feminine grace, an exotic paradisiacal sensibility that epitomizes both the complexity of the Pacific islands' history and the magic that sometimes results from the mixture of cultures and peoples.

The feathered capes and headdresses, the fiber and kapa clothing, tattoos, leis, jewelry and cosmetics — skillfully displayed for their maximum aesthetic impact in the museum's compact galleries on the first floor of the Chamberlain House — all provide stimuli for conversations about social values and realities, the complex effects of cross-cultural contact, and the creative use of motifs, materials and technology in the service of human yearning and ambition.

The exhibition provides not only an engaging historical account that facilitates critical thinking and respect for diversity, but also a provocative glimpse into what uniquely defines us as human beings.

Check out the schedule of public lectures at the museum by scholars in the art, history and culture of Pacific bodily adornment; workshops and gallery talks by cultural experts from various Pacific islander communities for whose work adornment is central, such as kumu hula and traditional tattoo artists; and demonstrations and performances by cultural specialists and artists from local Pacific islander communities, especially Native Hawaiian and Micronesian.