  By adapting the near-degenerate regime designed by Kahn, Lyubich, and D.
Dudko, we prove that the boundaries of Herman rings with bounded type rotation
number and of the simplest configuration are quasicircles with dilatation
depending only on the degree and the rotation number. As a consequence, we show
that these Herman rings always degenerate to a Herman curve, i.e. an invariant
Jordan curve that is not contained in the closure of a rotation domain and on
which the map is conjugate to a rigid rotation. This process enables us to
construct the first general examples of rational maps having Herman curves of
bounded type with arbitrary degree and combinatorics. In particular, they do
not come from Blaschke products. We also demonstrate the existence of
Renormalization Theory for Herman curves by constructing rescaled limits of the
first return maps in the unicritical case.
