Under the rule of Director of Health Dr. David Graham, Suffolk County (which makes up most of Long Island) in New York State is seeking to institute wide ranging bans on what they call the “extremes” of body modification. Claiming that research has shown these acts to be dangerous, they seek to outlaw a broad range of procedures including implants, nose piercing, tongue piercing and splitting, piercings near the eye, forms of cosmetic tattooing, genital and nipple piercing, and scarification including cutting, branding, and skin braiding.

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

– Henry David Thoreau

At age forty, after single-handedly creating the “muscle car” trend in America, John Delorean was put in charge of Pontiac, making him the youngest division head in GM history. After four years of record profits he was promoted again to head of Chevrolet, which in two years he transformed from a financially troubled company to one with sales equal to every other GM brand combined. Then in 1973, at age 48 and the peak of his career, John Delorean quit to do charity work. Many were predicting that one day he would be President of the United States.

A few years after leaving, John Delorean started showing the car that would later become the DMC-12, the exotic gullwing-door stainless steel-skinned car which most people know best from the Back To The Future movies. The car was originally called the DSV — the Delorean Safety Vehicle — and was designed not as a sportscar, but as a safe daily driver which tried to address many of the problems John saw with modern car production. At the same time, Delorean co-authored a book called On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, in which he accused GM of stagnation and caring more about profits than the customers or the cars.

John and the Delorean DMC-12

As the DMC-12 approached production, Delorean attempted to block the publication of his own book, fearing that the big car companies with their massive government lobbying power would do everything they could to sink his new venture at its most vulnerable point. Even with a huge grant from the Irish government, and a wonderful car (having owned a Delorean, I say that with some conviction) that was Europe’s only profitable car for the years it was made, the company was plagued with problems — said to source from many questionable payoffs to British government officials by GM — and it wasn’t long before it was in serious monetary difficulty.

Undercover FBI agents approached Delorean, offering to solve his financial woes. They proposed that cocaine be loaded into the door panels of his cars as they were shipped overseas, using them to transport the drug. John Delorean was arrested for conspiracy to traffic narcotics, and as he fought the charges, the DMC company went bankrupt, and the government — which received millions of dollars in “donations” from GM — moved in illegally and seized all of the tooling from the company, and, contrary to UK automobile law, dumped the tooling in the ocean insuring that not only could the company not be resurrected after the trial, but replacement parts couldn’t even be made.

The only reason that John Delorean avoided a long term prison sentence is that Hustler publisher Larry Flynt was able to obtain tapes showing not only that the drug trafficking idea was invented and proposed by the US government, but that both the cocaine and the money were provided FBI, and most importantly, that John Delorean told the undercover agents that he wasn’t interested and begged to be let go — the tapes show the agents actually threatening to kill John Delorean’s daughter if he didn’t proceed with the drug deal. It should also be noted that Larry Flynt was briefly imprisoned for contempt of court for revealing this information.

John Delorean with his daughter Christina, who US government agents
threatened to kill if John didn’t proceed with their proposed cocaine deal.

Delorean’s lawyer was later quoted in Time magazine saying, “This was a fictitious crime. Without the government, there would be no crime.”

John Delorean recently died destitute, having failed to bring his dream car back to market.

That brings us to piercer and cutter Todd Bertrang, a regular BME contributor that was first profiled in PFIQ magazine. In addition to his successful business dealing in and restoring classic Indian Motorcycles, he is best known for his advocation of heavy gauge piercing, alternative herbal aftercare, and his interest in female genital cutting — labial removal, hood splitting and removal, and even clitoral tip removal. At age forty, he was almost single-handedly responsible for the popularity of female genital modification, which, largely due to his promotion of it, had moved out of the fetish scene and become a lucrative business for cosmetic surgeons.

While many outsiders disapproved of Todd’s methods and highly sexual lifestyle, the vast majority of Todd’s clients — all consensual of course — spoke extremely highly of him and were very happy with the work he’d done on them.

Todd’s interest in body modification was almost exclusively sexual — as is the case for the vast majority of people who came into body modification before it became a fashion trend. It turned him on, plain and simple, and he never hid that fact or felt ashamed of it. An irrepressible flirt (that’s putting it kindly — others would say “dirtbag sleaze that kept hitting on my fifteen year-old kid sister and didn’t stop when she told him to get lost’ — well, welcome to the world of the Internet), Todd made more enemies than he knew in BME’s chat rooms and other online forums, mostly among sexually repressed individuals who felt body modification was best paired with a chic haircut and no needles — let alone scalpels — below the belt.

Todd Bertrang not long before his arrest.

A group of chatters who were offended by Todd’s comments and online advances conspired to get rid of Todd for good, and synchronized fraudulent reports to authorities in his area, the FBI, and other government agencies. “Todd Bertrang did a circumcision on a ten year old,” they told agents, claiming that he’d boasted about it online and showed them pictures. Even though even a cursory investigation of Todd would make it clear that the idea of cutting a ten year old would be reprehensible to him, as these fabrications continued to pour in, eventually the FBI had no choice but to start an investigation under California’s anti-FGM (female genital mutilation) laws, designed to stop immigrants from non-consensually mutilating their pre-pubescent daughters’ genitals for religious and cultural reasons.

Posing as an Egyptian couple with (non-existent) eight and twelve year old daughters, FBI agents approached Todd seeking his services as a cutter. They told him they didn’t want to have to travel back to the Middle East and offered him $8,000 to do the procedure. Todd wasn’t interested, and told them so, although he was willing to talk to them about the pros and cons of the procedure. He told his friends about this couple and expressed his dismay that they would do this to children.

The FBI agents kept calling back, and even visited, pushing Todd to do the procedure. Eventually they told Todd that “one hand washes the other”, and let him know that they were interested in moving their assets from Egypt to the United States. If he’d be willing to help them out with their problem with their daughters, they’d be willing to invest $20 million in his motorcycle business.

“I’ll think about it,” he told them.

Ask yourselves: how far would you compromise your ethics for $20 million? That’s an amount of money so high that you’d be able to fulfill all your dreams and live in luxury for the rest of your life. At how many million dollars does your cracking point lie?

And then, before letting him decide whether or not he’d actually make such an ethical compromise, in late 2002 the FBI raided his house, and Todd Bertrang and his girlfriend Robyn have been in prison ever since. No real evidence was ever presented against them, and no trial was ever held. Virtually no one stood up to defend Todd, and even those who supported of him cowered cautiously, fearing that they would be next. Robyn was threatened with the loss of her daughter, and eventually the two of them, being told they would be spending the rest of their lives in prison should they plead not guilty, chose to make a false confession on a variety of charges in exchange for reduced time. Todd received five years, and Robyn two.

I’d like to take give you an overview of what they were actually “convicted” of.

Child Porn
The “child porn” in question is a photo of Robyn’s daughter running around their house. It is a casual family snapshot that they had posted on their websites (currently offline) and was certainly not sexual in any way, and no different than the photos that surely exist in a vast number of family photo albums around the world. However, child porn laws are written so broadly that virtually any photo of a child can be prosecuted in this way.

Obscenity
Robyn was convicted of obscenity for posting healed photos of her genital modification. The photos were documentary in nature and barely in a sexual context (one of the photos she was convicted on is shown below — will I be next?). Outside of all the other free speech, general hypocrisy, and selective prosecution issues in this case, the fact is that photos exactly like this are all over the Internet, including on the websites of the many cosmetic surgeons offering this very procedure.

Is this really all it takes to violate obscenity laws?
(ADULTS-ONLY PICTURE)

Conspiracy to Violate FGM Laws
During the trial, copies of the email Todd exchanged with the agents were released. These emails show Todd urging the “parents” to reconsider the operation, advising them that doing this procedure on children will scar them sexually and emotionally and that they will not benefit from it — not until they start floating $20 million in front of him does he start to waver. The fact is that Todd has no record of working on children and is only motivated in working on sexually mature individuals because that’s where his interest lies. Suggesting that Todd is part of a shadowy Islamic network of pseudo doctors cutting children’s genitals is fraudulent.

Felon in Possession of a Firearm
Alright, that one is probably legitimate, although Todd claims that it’s more a matter of confusion and not being told that it was an issue — thanks to America’s lax laws on gun purchases, no red flags showed up when he bought a handgun for home protection and he never considered at the time it was a problem.

In conclusion, as John Delorean’s lawyer said about him, about Todd Bertrang I repeat: “This was a fictitious crime. Without the government, there would be no crime.”

Todd Bertrang was falsely accused, falsely prosecuted, and now sits falsely imprisoned due to being sexually different than the average person, and uncontrollably vocal about it. Five years of his life are gone, his family has been ripped apart, his business has been destroyed and his assets stolen, and dangerous precedents have been set. Those of you who conspired to make this happen should be ashamed of yourselves, and the government shows once again its incompetence and inherent prejudicial nature by again jailing the victim rather than the real criminals.

As I write this, parts of the United States are considering criminalizing even nostril piercings — how far will this go? Cutters, and all people who are different from the mainstream — gays, fetishists, atheists, piercers, unionists, and the rest — I warn you: keep an anonymous and low profile, or get out of America before the same happens to you.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

I received the following letter from a close friend of Todd’s that has been helping him keep his affairs in order while he’s behind bars. I’d like to share it here if anyone would like to help out or even just send Todd a note letting him know he has support. I’ll post again on this subject when the address is updated, but as of now the San Bernadino one is still good.

Todd got a five year sentence, but it is more like a death sentence. All the newspapers portrait him as a child genital mutilator. He might never come out a live, even though he never agree to do any genital mutilations on children. His life has already been threatened several times since he’s been in custody. Todd had no choice but to plea bargain to a lot of these charges. For the charge of conspiracy he was facing five years to life.

At this point Todd is a dead man walking. All the newspaper and news media should be so very proud of themselves, they just gave Todd a dead sentence for a crime he never committed. He is in absolute terror not knowing where his going. The prosecutor hates Todd so much that even when the judge gave Todd the five year sentence, he insisted that the judge should had given Todd a longer sentence. They also made sure the media was present for his sentencing.

Robyn will be out in about two months. She has requested not to have any contact with Todd. She also requested not to be transported with him to court, or be next to each him in the holding cells during the court proceedings. That’s what I call loyalty!!!

We still owe [Todd’s Lawyer] $52,000. By the grace of God I’ve been able to sell a lot of our furniture and parts, but there is very little left. I have sold everything for pennies on the dollar. If there are any supporters out there, please ask if they could help us out with any small donations sent directly to him. Todd spends about $80.00 a month for food and personal hygiene. I’m pretty sure that you’re aware of what a great business is to put people behind bars.

They can only send a money order or cashiers checks, payable to “Todd Bertrang”.

Todd Bertrang
BKG# 0407301101 AS-3
630 E. Rialto Ave
San Bernardino, Ca. 92415

Kind regards,
[Name removed]

You can send letters and cards to that address, as well as any financial support you can offer if you’d like, but nothing else can be sent there. Books and magazines can be sent, but they have to come straight from the source (ie. you can have Amazon send them there, but you can’t mail a book there).

“Take calculated risks.
 That is quite different from being rash.”

– George S. Patton

Every time BME is updated I get many pictures of “corset piercings” sent in. At this point they’ve become one of the most popular forms of surface piercings, and for good reason — they’re a very pretty, sexy piercing that can be extremely complimentary visually. But when I get these pictures, I’m far too often struck with a mix of sadness and anger. Sadness for the women who are being tricked into mutilation, and anger at the likely incompetent, irresponsible, and in my opinion, negligent piercers who are doing it to them.

Surface piercings are never easy to heal, even single piercings with well chosen jewelry and a good site. I believe that it’s usually an acceptable risk though — some people will walk away from surface piercings, even done perfectly, left with an ugly scar rather than jewelry embedded in flesh. But in the case of corset piercings, the big problem is that almost always they’re done not with surface piercing jewelry designed to minimize the problems, but with simple captive bead rings which exacerbate the problems and almost guarantee failure.

Yes, these piercings will look nice for a little while, but not long afterwards they will start to get irritated, reject, and the women will be left not with a pretty set of rings, but with two rows of scars running up their backs where the piercings once were. Depending on their skin type and how long the piercings were kept, these scars may be highly visible, noticeably uneven, and can stay with them for life — as much as they may come with good memories, they are likely not the result hoped for when the wearer first saw the piercings and thought how pretty they looked.

The fact that corset piercings done with rings are not viable piercings should be known to all but the most inexperienced piercers. Certainly doing a single test piercing and following up with the client — which is required if you’re doing something new and experimental — would illustrate this fact. That these piercers appear to be either unaware of this truth, or willing to overlook it, is deeply disturbing to me.

Why do they do it? In my opinion it’s one simple reason: they want a “cool” photo for their portfolio, and they care more about that than doing what’s right for their customers. As I said, I believe that most piercers doing this know that it’s going to fail. Sometimes they tell the client “it probably won’t work”, but of course the eager young person that’s been fantasizing about the piercing since they first saw it is rarely discouraged by this wishy-washy warning — after all, they’ll take care of their piercing, unlike those other people it failed on. It’s got to work, right? But no miracle will happen. The warning’s not even true — probably won’t? More accurately put, this piercing almost certainly won’t work, will at best fail as anything but a play piercing, and at worst leave the customer with serious and permanent unsightly scars.

It is true that some people can heal a ring in a surface piercing, or at least keep it for a while. It’s very rare for it to happen without a great deal of visibly obvious irritation, but it can happen, especially in people who are older and have skin that’s lost its elasticity. But I’ve never seen anyone who can hold a dozen surface piercings done with rings in the long term without serious scarring and rejection problems. This is not a viable piercing done this way.

They look great, but if left in, these will not heal successfully, and will leave scars.
They may be ideal as play piercings and temporary ritualized beauty, but they can’t be kept.

Now, I’m almost angrier at people who use the “inexperienced” excuse. Any piercer that says “I didn’t know any better” is being negligent, since they are doing a piercing that they’re not only not qualified to do, but have done little to no follow-up with their customers on to see how surface piercings heal. Even living in a vacuum, all it would take is doing one or two rings as a test and watching them for a month, to show a piercer the obvious problems… but taking precautions voids the cool photo, and I guess that’s more important?

If you’re just doing the piercings for “dress up” on a special occasion (I know people who’ve had these for both Prom and Halloween outfits), then go for the corset rings if you want to. But then we’re not really talking about body piercing, are we? We’re in the realm of temporary play piercing, which while very valid, isn’t what this article is about (and I got a few angry emails from piercers when I filed their corset photos in that section, and if you read people’s stories in BME’s archives, most want them to be permanent) — this method of doing a corset piercing is not acceptable if the client has any desire for a piercing that lasts.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying people shouldn’t do corset piercings or difficult to heal piercings in general. The fact that I think anyone who lets their monkey drive at 200 mph on the highway is a fool doesn’t mean I have a basic problem with doing 200 mph on the autobahn — or with monkeys. After all, I’ve published articles on and perhaps even encouraged things as obviously risky and prone to failure as eyelid piercing. People just have to be responsible and do things the best way possible, and doing a corset piercing with rings is about the worst way possible. That said, they very much can be done right.

There is jewelry designed to deal with these placements — surface bars most obviously, which can be fitted with beads that have rings mounted on them, and while not quite as graphic in appearance, come close to the look of rings alone and actually can be healed. For other people flexible jewelry such as Tygon or PTFE-based bars have been successful, but I believe surface bars are a far better option. Even transdermal implants do better than captive bead rings. It’s still not going to be easy, and the piercings or implants will have to be babied for a long time before they can really be called healed, but at least it moves it into the realm of the possible and worth doing for something other than a photo or a two-day fantasy.

Done with proper jewelry, this piercing can be kept in the long term.
There is still a high risk of rejection, but it is hugely minimized.

By writing this article I may have guaranteed that a group of piercers and piercing fans who send me cool photos — which I enjoy as much as they do — will stop contributing to the site. I apologize if I’ve hurt your feelings, and I hope you’ll keep working with BME, but this has to be called out. Even if you know it’s temporary and are OK with that, too many people go into it with dreams of keeping them. After years of looking at these piercings and wondering how the client is going to feel when they’ve moved from jewelry to scarification, I feel it’s important to make this warning public.

Please piercers, don’t do something for the sake of a photo. Don’t put your portfolio’s cool-factor ahead of the welfare of your customers. And those of you considering difficult piercings — please understand these are permanent modifications to your body. They may look pretty for the first week, but is that worth a lifetime of scars that you may not enjoy quite as much? By all means, do it, but do it right.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

– Bill Gates

I recently interviewed a couple hundred piercers about the low points of their career. You know how they say “the customer is always right”? Well, these piercers might not agree with that claim. Their stories break down into the four sections of this article:

1. The customer is always right stinky
   

   Stories about piercing clients with serious lapses in personal hygiene.

   
   While I think most piercers have ran across the occasional hedge that needs to be trimmed, or butt-crack that needs a good washing, the worst hygiene problem I’ve encountered was a session during a hood piercing. Once she was on the table and went to go spread her legs, I got a blast of a smell that nearly floored me, but the visual was the worst part. This stringy white and yellow shit was all over her cooter, and as she spread her legs, it stretched like a spider web. It was nasty. Stinky crotch goo.
   

   
   

2. The customer is always right perverted
   
   If you get aroused by this section, stick to self piercing.

   
   I had a guy once while getting his frenum pierced start sticking his finger in his own anus and sort of masturbating it, just moving it in and out of his anus. I asked “Um… what are you doing?” And he replied, as if nothing was wrong, “oh when I feel pain this makes it better.” I told him he couldn’t do that in here and he agreed but continued to do it. I just very quickly finished with the piercing and told him not to touch anything on his way out.
   

3. The customer is always right suicidal
   

   A compendium of some of the insane things people do to themselves when the piercer isn’t there to help.

   
   I saw a kid that tried to stretch his own tongue with the latch from an outdoor gate (the hook in eye-bolt kind). He came in because once he got the hook through the hole he couldn’t get it to move. So for a day he was walking around with a patio latch hanging out of his mouth. That procedure required cutting the material out of the tongue.
   

4. The customer is always right angry
   
   Encounters with violent and deranged clients are far too common.

   
   A guy came in ready to kill us for piercing his underage daughter. We tried to find out who it was — he even said she would have used a fake ID, but we didn’t even the name of the fake ID on record so we told him we didn’t do it. This just made him even more upset. He was like well she told me she got it at blah blah blah shop, and we where like “uhh… sir, this isn’t even that shop!” He looked at us all dumbfounded and turned and walked away… he later came back to get a tattoo.
   

Reconsidering taking on a glamorous life as a piercer? As one of the piercers I talked to put it, “and people seem to think I have a fucking dream job.”

Next time you go and get a piercing, please, at least have a shower first.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

Illustrations by Jason Craig (iam:jasonthe29th).

"A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind"

– Henry Ward Beecher

As you probably know, BME doesn’t generally cover piercing guns. It’s not because of safety issues (see BME/Risks) – BME discusses many activities that are equally or even more dangerous and ill-advised. It’s a cultural issue. Piercing gun “culture”, if you can call it that, is distinct from BME’s focus on atypical body modification and is not particularly relevant to our core mission. However, piercing gun manufacturers like Studex are slowly starting to create tools that are capable of untrained piercing of not just ears and noses, but many other body parts as well. When navel piercing guns start being used at mall kiosks, how will piercers in fully equipped studios be affected?

Earlier designs of piercing guns were simple spring-loaded devices into which an ear piercing stud and backing could be loaded, held around the ear lobe, and then fired through.

“Piercing as easy as 1-2-3” …or so the brochure claims.

Not only was the system physically inadequate for anything but basic ear piercing, but the plastic gun was effectively impossible to keep sterile or even clean properly, and the system was linked to the spread of hepatitis and other diseases, as well as damage to cartilage resulting in infection and collapse of the ear’s structure. While these apparently primitive and destructive systems are still a dominant force in the industry, recently a number of companies have released “cartridge based” piercing systems which attempt to address the majority of these problems.

Cartridge based systems improve on the spring-loaded guns in two main ways. First, they tend to use a “pusher” system which forces the piercing stud through the tissue by squeezing a handle which drives the stud, rather than aggressively firing it with spring action. In theory this causes less trauma to the tissue (no more shattered cartilage), as well as reducing the potential for blood spray which could contaminate the gun. Second, the cartridge which contains the stud as well as some of the gun’s mechanism is disposable, immensely reducing the potential for transfer of microbes from client to client even if the mechanism is exposed to the client’s fluids.

Rachel and I were able to meet with Ken Gardner, Studex’s Canadian distributor, who was kind enough to offer us their latest product for review – the “System 75(TM)”. While he did later characterize us as”tattooed from asshole to head” and with “ears big enough to put a tennis ball through”, he was likable and helpful, defended us against their main branch’s fears, and we walked away with a bag full of product for review as well as some literature on the devices.

A two gun System (TM) kit from Studex including a marking pen,
cleaning solution and wipes, two plastic guns, and a sample cartridge.

I was surprised Ken was so helpful – Studex’s reputation is far less friendly, largely due to lawyer Fred Safford’s notoriety for threatening anyone involved in body piercing who speaks out negatively against piercing guns. Even though medical journals have documented and published numerous articles showing everything from Hepatitis transferred by ear piercing studs, to physical damage to the ear, it can be very difficult to speak publicly about these surprisingly common problems – many professionals inside the industry urged me not to write this article for fear of BME being hit with a nuisance suit. In any case, Ken assured me that these problems had not only been addressed in the new System 75™ design, but that according to Fred, the doctors had universally recanted their claims about even the older style guns (which Studex continues to market today). Ken didn’t have the information on these studies, but Fred offered to send me information about these doctors’ retractions. Below is the entirety of the letter which I received from Fred:

This wasn’t particularly convincing (and implied the risk remained in the older style guns they continued to market alongside the System 75), so I did a few searches through MEDLINE and other services. Hundreds of articles discussing the risks of piercing guns and warnings to avoid them were returned, and I wasn’t able to find a single one describing either benefits over studio piercing or mentioning a retraction of previous claims. A great many focused on dermatitis and metal allergies due to the apparently low grade of materials used in some of the jewelry, but many others were directly related to complications due to the design of the gun or the stud itself.

Complications included marked increases of hepatitis infections among people with piercings done with a piercing gun, several with apparent direct links (where they were able to pinpoint the point of infection directly, rather than circumstantially), as well as problems such as embedded earrings, viremia and liver disease resulting from infections contracted from piercing guns, pseudomonas aeruginosa and other acute psudomonas chrondritis secondary to ear piercing, ear deformity, pseudolymphoma, sarcoidal tissue reactions, auricular chondritis, toxic shock syndrome, perichondrial abscesses, post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis, cytotoxicity due to corrosion of the jewelry, and a wide variety of other complications. I was able to find studies from the 1970′s up until today, and during most of that period, no significant changes were made by the ear piercing industry to correct the problem. However, now that piercing studios have significantly threatened their market dominance, they’ve finally been forced to respond – apparently not for ethical reasons or because of caring about their customers, but for survival. Thus the System 75™ from Studex and other analogous products from other companies such as Inverness have hit the market. However, even knowing these risks (and presumably acknowledging them by addressing them with the new designs), they have not taken earlier designs off the market.

In all fairness, it must be noted that a great deal of care has gone into the design of the System 75™, which really does represent an enormous leap over the older guns (which the above mentioned studies primarily refer to) which were easier to link to serious health problems.

The “pusher” system is the only part of the System 75(TM) which is used more than once; all other components are disposable. In theory none of this plastic body ever comes in contact with the customer.

The cartridges come in sealed sterile packaging, which can presumably be handled freely without putting the contents at risk.

Opening the package does not involve touching the cartridge or jewelry, which is at the opposite end of the package from the part that is peeled off.

The cartridge is then picked up using the gun. The part that is exposed when the packaging is peeled open is the part that interfaces with the gun, so the easiest way to use the unit is also the safest.

The packaging is then discarded, leaving the jewelry exposed. Unlike some of the other systems on the market, it is very easy to see where the jewelry point is and the system is simple to co-ordinate and line up with one’s marks.

The trigger is depressed, pushing the jewelry through the tissue and latching the stud into its backing. The gun’s design does not allow crushing the tissue, and different length studs are available for different sized lobes. When the trigger is released, the part of the cartridge that held the stud opens like a flower and releases the jewelry.

After piercing, every part of the gun that came in contact with the client – the cartridge – is discarded. Unlike a spring loaded system which is almost entirely reused between clients, the perfect-world potential for contamination using the System 75(TM) as directed is extremely minimal. Even if the pusher unit itself became contaminated – which to me seems inevitable – the odds of transferring that contamination between clients seems very, very low. A large number of designs of jewelry are available in these sterile packs, so there should be no need to switch the jewelry after piercing as was sometimes done in the past.

Above right you can see the child-sized “practice ear” with recommended placements. In the past, upper ear placements were strongly frowned upon due to the damage that could be done to cartilage by forcibly firing a dull stud through it, but the slow-push method in the new systems is thought to address this. In order to try it out we had a little “piercing gun party” and added studs to myself and a number of friends. Ear placements were simple and largely uneventful.

The only problem we had is that the cartridge’s release system (the part that’s supposed to open up and let go of the jewelry after the piercing) failed on a few of our test piercings, resulting in us needing to use our hands to physically force it open to release – which of course instantly eliminated most of the benefits of the new system and put both the operator and the client at unnecessary risk. A number of the cartridges actually fell apart entirely as we were using them. Because of this it seems important that anyone using this gun wear gloves in case they need to handle the jewelry or tissue directly.

The interesting thing about the System 75(TM) though, and the real reason I’m reviewing it, is that it’s designed to bridge gun technology into much more than just ear or nose piercing – it’s designed to be able to pierce nipples, navels, eyebrows, and more. When I talked to Studex, this was not yet approved in the US or in most of Canada, but Ken told me that in Quebec, parts of Europe, and most of all Japan, the gun was being used for full-on body piercing. Even the US-distributed catalog, which is primarily ear oriented, shows jewelry that while labeled as being for “ear piercing” appears to be more appropriate for body piercing due to its length and gauge (although some of it is tagged as being “Europe only”).

Ken was able to provide us with a number of the Japanese developed body piercing cartridges. They appeared to be 14 gauge, and came as both straight and curved barbells. The basic idea was the same as the ear piercing studs, although much more physical contact was needed to use them. The cartridge sits on its side in the packaging, requiring one to take it out by hand, rather than handling it exclusively with the pusher. In addition, after forcing the stud through the tissue being pierced, the bead has to be screwed on. Many of the benefits of the System 75(TM) were lost.

This is one of the body piercing gun barbells.

As you can see, it is not very sharp, and contains a very steep bevel, making piercing both painful and difficult. This is additionally complicated by external threading which tears up the piercing as it passes through the freshly made hole.

Still, we attempted several piercings using this system. The first and somewhat bizarre problem we discovered, on our navel piercing attempt, was that the curved barbell was facing out in a concave fashion. This meant that it was being held in the exact opposite way required to do this or any other piercing, and was extremely difficult to coordinate – but BME photographer and guinea pig Phil Barbosa bravely allowed us to attempt it anyway. Using all of her strength, Rachel forced the stud into his belly as he grimaced in pain. The dull point managed to penetrate the first layer of skin, and then eventually ground to a halt as the external threading tore up Phil’s navel and wouldn’t allow us to get it all the way through no matter how hard any of us squeezed the unit’s handle, which eventually fell apart in protest. Extracting the stud wasn’t very fun either, as we had to pull the threading back through the fresh injury.

Every cartridge we used for body piercing disintegrated during use, and while the rate of failure was much lower when we used the smaller gauge ear studs, it was still unacceptably high. Also in this photo are one of the standard ear piercing studs with a butterfly backing, as well as a barbell bead, and a nostril piercing stud (about 14ga, but flaring out to 12ga to hold it in place).

We did a second test piercing on Badur through his hand web. It took an incredible amount of force to drive the stud through – probably about the same as it would take to drive a nail into soft wood using only your hand, was excessively painful, and the unit failed to release the stud, causing it to be partially pulled back into the wound and forcing us to dismantle the unit by hand to abort the piercing. People stopped volunteering so we tried piercing pieces of cloth, which also broke the cartridges. Finally we tried simply piercing the air, and continued to have the same failures. While it might be possible to modify it, I do not believe that this element of the System 75(TM) is a mature product yet, and I am somewhat disturbed that there are people using it on unsuspecting clients.

Even if the issue of the cartridges falling apart can be addressed or somehow explained away as a freak batch, I’m not convinced that performing commercial body piercings (rather than small gauge ear piercings) is a viable option with this design. It might be possible to build a unit that used a cutting bevel to place the jewelry, but even with that fix, it would be difficult to address the contamination issues in a way that made them sufficiently “idiot-proof” to be used by largely untrained staff. In addition, once the design reaches this level of complexity, it seems to me that it would be less complicated – and far less expensive – to simply use a traditional piercing studio.

In terms of ear piercing, if the System 75(TM) had not fallen apart so consistently in my testing I’d actually be giving it a thumbs up – in theory it is a well designed unit that really does address nearly every one of the physical problems that existed with earlier spring-loaded ear piercing systems. However, at least the units that I was given to test were not reliable and forced us to use our hands directly in enough cases to offset these corrections. If Studex is able to fix the release system then this is a safe unit for small gauge ear piercing, including cartilage piercing, in my opinion, although one must consider that the people using the guns are relatively untrained, have minimal access to contamination control devices and chemicals, and the possibility for misuse resulting in injury is very real. Studex also sells a smaller system of a similar design for single-use home piercing – the Medisept(TM) – and of the guns they make I’d select that one over the others.

In conclusion, Studex’s System 75(TM) does make significant improvements over traditional piercing gun systems, although I find it distasteful that these systems do not appear to have been developed until recently (and still have not been made exclusive), given that the problems have been documented and understood since at least the seventies. Additionally, given the failure rates we experienced, I can not in good conscience recommend them, especially since piercing studios equipped with contamination control knowledge and supplies – and autoclaves – offer ear piercing services within a few dollars of the same price. That said, if you’re going to get pierced with a gun and you don’t want to do it yourself, this is the right system to choose and offers immense advantages over a primitive spring loaded non-cartridge system. Finally, piercers have nothing to worry about in terms of the navel or nipple market being captured by this device or a similar one, as it is neither safe nor functional for general body piercing at this point, at least in our testing.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

System 75, Medisept, and Studex are trademarks of STUDEX, Inc.
Thank you to Bagatelle Marketing for providing product samples and information.

“People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.”

– R. Buckminster Fuller