Body piercing is WEIRD...

I always try to make sure new customers to the studio fully understand that piercings are NOT supposed to succeed. Totally weird that they ever do. Seriously!

To explain this, think of your skin as a giant barrier - it is designed to keep in everything inside and everything outside, well, out. Lol! SO asking it - not just to accept a foreign object - but to literally grow a TUNNEL of new skin around that object is just a HUGE ask!! And super WEIRD!!

It takes a TON of precious energy to do this tunnel-thing. But it takes WAY MORE to get ahold of it and shove it out. This is called “rejection” or “migration”, and it is actually the normal reaction of the skin to a foreign object. So it is always a better approach to understand that a piercing failing is NORMAL skin behavior and that piercing healing is… You guessed it… WEIRD! Lol!

Here’s the good news - Our bodies are just lazy enough to actually do what we want in this case! Lol! No, I’m not joking around here - the skin literally decides that it would be too much work to reject the piercing and much easier to just call in a platoon of skin cells to start building new skin layers. Professional piercers know this, and we choose starter jewelry of appropriate thickness for this reason - making it that much more difficult for the skin to shove it out.

How cool is that?! So darn COOL!!

Most people these days have a throw-away concept of piercings. How many times have you heard (maybe even said) “If you don’t like it you can take it out…” I find this to be a very misguided way of thinking about piercings. And I am notorious for reminding my clients of the need for a more serious consideration of what piercings actually are.

The fact is, a piercing is a WOUND. It is a type called a “puncture wound” and it is in the shape of a tube, which inherently have a lot of different needs than the surface or linear ones we are used to dealing with. The most important aspect of healing a piecing is focusing on it AS a wound, not as jewelry. Yes, there is jewelry involved. But it is important as a means to proper and complete healing rather than for its looks. It is a very important part of the healing process - second only to proper piercing technique. I like to say that starter jewelry is more akin to a cast for a broken bone than it is to a necklace.

The use of a stable and inert material is also imperative to successful healing. The skin will literally be forming AROUND the part of the jewelry that is INSIDE the piercing itself. (I always point this out when showing a client the hand-bent nostril jewelry I customize for them. And their eyes glaze over when I stress how important it is… I get it. I get it!! It’s all about the SPARKLE!! Lol!) Surgical steel or titanium are stable and inert. Gold and silver are not. Now you know. Lol!

As piercers, we all make the best-guess we can for the thickness and diameter of starter jewelry. This is based 100% on the training and experience of the piercer. Sometimes the body has its own ideas about the piercing., mostly because of all the stuff I wrote above. At Kutters Edge, this is the primary purpose of the included starter jewelry, aftercare services and follow-up contact. Understanding just how WEIRD piercing healing truly is motivates us to be there when your piercing acts up. Make sure to get in touch!