Sharp Thinking: Using Caution with Body Piercings

By: Megan Furtado
Posted In: News

A young woman, barely out of her teenage years, gingerly takes her seat on the end of a long, narrow table. Next to her, a burly man with strange markings and tattoos all over his body puts a mask on his face and tells her to lie down. Eyes cast upward, she leans back on the table, her feet swinging off the end. As he picks up his sharpened object, she closes her eyes.

Simply another young woman getting the cartilage of her ear pierced, this sight is becoming more and more frequent as body piercing continues to grow in popularity.

Walking among any college campus today, one can’t help but see a wide variety of body piercings, each person’s different than the others. There are many varieties to choose from: ears, nose, lip, tongue, eyebrow, navel, and many other places that won’t be mentioned in this article.

Before the 1980s and the study of the HIV, many people pierced themselves, or were pierced by inexperienced friends or siblings: at home, using a sewing needle sterilized by heating with matches or boiling, and numbing the earlobe or other body part with an ice cube. Today, to support the demand for a clean and safe piercing environment, piercing salons, methods, and piercers themselves are much more cautious.

TAKING THE PLUNGE

Jef Saunders, of Rockstar Body Piercing in Providence, Rhode Island, says that males and female often differ in their choice of body piercings.

“The most popular piercings we perform at Rockstar include nostril and navel piercings for girls, and tongues and labrets for the guys,” he explains (A labret is a curve-shaped barbell pierced through the lower lip so that a tiny ball sits below the lip line). “Just about any piercing that you’ve seen can probably be performed safely. While there are piercings that I personally don’t think should be performed on just anybody, there are experienced body modifiers that I feel could handle just about anything.”

However, the Association of Professional Piercers (APP), which licenses piercers and sets safety standards for piercing studios, attests that there are physical problems individuals have that could (and should) influence any decisions made about body piercing. According to the official APP website (www.safepiercing.com), people with heart disease, diabetes, hemophilia, or immunodeficiency disorders (such as HIV) should consult a physician before piercing. The APP also stresses that pregnant women, or women intending to get pregnant in the near future, should wait until after giving birth to pierce themselves, as giving birth is an exhausting procedure and will take time to heal, interrupting the healing process for body piercing, and possibly impeding it.

“You should never pierce any areas of your body that have scars or scar tissue without talking to a physician,” says Lynn Alessandro, a nurse at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital in North Providence. “Scars indicate scar tissue, which when pierced is liable to rupture and cause severe bleeding.”

However, for those ambitious few, there are an infinite number of body parts that are prime for piercing.

“Everything can be pierced…we have policies, though. We don’t do surface piercings, like the forehead, the nape of the neck, across the back of the wrist, things like that, where there’s no edge. They grow out; they scar. People come back and complain. It’s better not to risk the possibility of a lawsuit. There are also people piercing deeper than we feel is safe. Quite often, they’re not so good,” says John Lopez, a professional body piercer who works at Gotham Body Piercing and Tattoo Salon in San Francisco, California.

LOOKING DOWN THE END OF THE GUN

Kimberly Rau wasn’t even a teenager when a jeweler pierced both her first and second holes with a piercing gun in the pagoda of a Connecticut mall. When she was eighteen, she put a third hole in her left ear, and only last year, her navel was pierced at Evolutions Body Piercing in Providence. Her number of piercings now totals six.

“I’m considering (piercing) my cartilage, but people who have a cartilage and a navel (piercing) said the cartilage hurt worse, so I’m hesitant…the one thing I really wanted was my navel, and I have that,” Rau says.

Rau, like many teenagers and young adults who go to malls and jewelry stores to be pierced, had the procedure done with a piercing gun, a small hand-held tool. The stud is placed on one side of the gun, while the backing that holds the stud in the ear is placed on the opposite side, and the two pieces are placed on opposite sides of the earlobe. When the “gun” is “fired”, the stud shoots through the ear, piercing it, and the backing of the stud is locked into place.

The APP, along with many licensed body piercers and salon owners, advise against the ear gun, claiming that the piercing gun is unhealthy and often not completely sterile for use in piercing. The gun cannot be completely broken down and sterilized, and it is not disposable, like a piercing needle. The rapid “firing” action of the gun often crushes cartilage and damages it. Ear studs are shot through with such force that they often become embedded into the skin, which could cause infection or lack of circulation through the ear. Also, it does not take a genius to operate a piercing gun. Many people who pierce in malls or low-quality salons with piercing guns are not certified or trained.

Mandy Herstam, 20, had the cartilage of her ear pierced at Afterthoughts, an accessory store/piercing pagoda at Emerald Square Mall in North Attleboro. The piercer used a piercing gun to shove the earring through the cartilage.

“A month or two went by, and it was fine. I was cleaning it, following all directions. And then a pimple developed all of a sudden, underneath the piercing on my ear. It started to become painful, and very red,” Herstam says.

Luckily for Herstam, she was referred by her university’s health services to Skin Medicine, a clinic in Newport. There, a doctor explained that a keloid, an infection caused by trauma to the ear, had developed under the piercing. He took the stud out, shot the area with Cortisone, and eventually, the abscess fell off. But Herstam wasn’t left unscarred-the trauma of the gun to the cartilage left a tiny lump in the back of her ear.

The alternative to the piercing gun is the piercing needle, mentioned above. The needle is a small, thin, hollow tube with an extremely sharp tip. Instead of crushing a stud or piece of jewelry through a hole, the needle is pushed in slowly by a piercer and catches the excess cartilage inside the hollow tube, removing it completely. Afterwards, the ring or hoop is pushed through the hole made by the needle and secured. The APP approves the piercing needle, which is not only completely sterilized and sanitary, but disposable. It also makes for a much healthier piercing. When Herstam had a fourth hole put into her right earlobe, she chose to have the procedure done with a sterilized needle.

CHOOSE WISELY

The most important decision one makes when choosing a body piercing is selecting the right piercer and salon. Location is the final step, and the most crucial, according to the APP. Good studios will often be well-lit and well-spoke of by others who have been pierced there. The environment should be very sterile. The APP suggests checking to see what instruments are used for piercing and what metals the jewelry is contrived of.

“To minimize risk of metal allergies, make sure the piercing is made of titanium…stainless steel, or 14-carat yellow or white gold,” advises Dr. Michael Castleman from the website WebMD, “The most allergenic metal is nickel.”

“The worst question to ask is, how much? If your only questions are “Does it hurt?” and “How much is it?” you could walk away with hepatitis and get liver cancer in 20 years, and not know where it came from. Good questions to ask a prospective piercer are: “How do you sterilize your equipment?” “Do you reuse needles?” If somebody’s too busy or uptight to answer them, just go somewhere else. It’s your liver we’re talking about,” John Lopez says.

A good studio will provide a sterile environment with sterilized, disposable instruments, including needles, gloves, masks, etc. The studio should have a license in plain view on the wall, perhaps even more than one license. A studio recognized by the APP complies exactly with APP standards, which are rigorous, so the studio should be perfectly acceptable.

It is also best to talk at length with the piercer beforehand. A good piercer will be happy to answer any questions or concerns. Portfolios or pictures of piercings give a good idea of what kind of work a piercer does. A good piercer will not act like a fearsome executioner of old (though he may look like one).

Jef Saunders insists that his clients at Rockstar Body Piercing take home a copy of aftercare instructions after his is finished piercing them. The sheet has the company’s phone number on it-and Saunders’ personal email address as well.

“As a piercer, nothing would pain me more than to think a client was afraid to ask me any questions,” he says.