So the fifteen year old DIY-piercer in this photo came in to Color Works in West Des Moines, Iowa with their mother after their doctor refused to help with the problem he’d caused. He’d decided to do the piercings himself — a pair of lip rings and a septum — using, and I kid you not, pieces of chain link that he’d clipped off with wire cutters. They weren’t pierced in place — they were just “crushed” in place with a pair of pliers and brutally crimped into his flesh!

Evan removed them (and one was even rusted), cleaned him up, and told him to go back to the doctor. While Evan was dealing with the problem, the kid refused to stop touching the problem areas no matter how much he was told, and his mother let his four little brothers and sisters come running into the piercing room from the lobby, upon which the one kid immediately starts going through the garbage. Jarret (who took the photos) got them under control as the mother told him about how she’d tried to cut the piercings out with scissors. Darwin Award anyone?

Seriously, this is why in my opinion laws need to allow young people to get body piercings. “18+” and “16+” laws do nothing but hurt young people. Doctors don’t give a fuck and don’t know what they’re talking about most of the time and are so constrained by liability insurance that they often can’t help even if they want to, parents are clueless, and there are plenty of fly-by-night shops and nomadic piercers willing to abuse pierce kids anyway… High quality shops need to be accessible to people of all ages, because the fact is, people of all ages want piercings, and they’ll get them one way or another.