Cale’s New Facial Scars

Cale Belford (piercer at True Blue Tattoo) just met up with Brian Decker (purebodyarts.com) and had this beautiful scarification done on her cheeks. The first photo shows it completely fresh, and the second was taken right after Cale cleaned it in the shower for the first time.

If you look carefully at the first photo you’ll notice that it’s half cut and half electrocautery branded. I wondered why that was so before posting I asked Brian whether this was just for fun, or if it had something to do with the way the different techniques behave on skin — for example, strike branding can cause the surrounding skin to contract and distort significantly. He replied,

Some of the reason was variety and fun, for sure. The “branding” was done with an electrosurgical cutting unit, which actually does little to no cellular damage outside what it touches, so the results are very much like scalpel cutting. The main reason I implemented the device is the ease of it. Scalpel cutting lines on faces is generally an annoying mess. The skin doesn’t open well and bleeds like hell. With the ESU I can pretty much shovel the skin off at whatever depth and width I want with no bleeding.

As if you need another reason to choose Brian Decker for your scarification work, but I hope this illustrates the value in going to a scarification artist with mountains of experience. Just because it doesn’t require a lot of skill to give yourself a glorious papercut, it doesn’t follow that it’s also childsplay to create a beautiful and balanced piece of scar art. I will of course post in the future on the healing of this piece.