At A Glance
Author	Princess Iscariot
Contact	[email protected]
When	N/A
Location	York, England

Patience is a Virtue 

My time spent working in a body-piercing studio has been well spent. I've learned much about the body, much about people, and the history behind many modifications. After three years of training, I've met various people who've had a profound effect on me- or rather, the opinions I have of people. With minor modifications now generally quite popular, and the general (mostly young) public being pierced and tattooed, you come across a wide variety of people in the field.

Most people I see being pierced are young, thinking they are going to make some unmade statement because they're getting their navel pierced. Originality is hard to find in Northern England, and apparently, so are real ID cards. I've had merchandise thrown at me in anger by the angry parents of a ten-year-old girl who my partner and I blatantly refused to pierce. I've had people challenge my knowledge of jewelry, claiming I was stupid if I thought titanium pieces were better to pierce with than gold plated pieces. Why do people think I say these things? Do you really think I would care if you got pierced with a gold barbell if it was perfectly safe to use? No. Little girls curse me out and call me a bitch when I tell them they're too young to be pierced, and they should wait.

I've become weary of angry parents insisting I stick a needle through their child. Why, oh why, would you want your ten-year-old to have an eyebrow/navel ring? I was playing with Barbie dolls when I was ten, and if my mom would've told me she was taking me to get a needle stuck through my eyebrow/navel/tongue, I would've screamed bloody murder. Society has changed, and sadly, many 'piercers' are reacting badly to the way society has become. People refuse to be patient, and are sacrificing their health and modifications because of it.

The angry mother who threw a box at me came back an hour later with her daughter, who had gone down the road to a different studio which pierced her. She proudly displayed her daughter's (uncovered) fresh navel piercing, still bloodied, and with badly placed gold plate jewelry. "AND!" She proclaimed, "they were �8 cheaper". If you needed surgery, and one hospital charged �1,000 and the other only �300, would you wonder what kind of doctor/treatment you'd be getting? Of course you would. People don't realize they're putting their bodies in jeopardy by choosing a studio based on price.

Many 'townie' girls come in asking for gold plate jewelry, which we refuse to pierce with because of the metal quality. We tell them they can change the jewelry as soon as they've healed and they want none of it. So we send them away, angry and unpierced. They come back, pierced with gold plate bars and saying "the bloke down the street says you're wrong and it's okay to pierce with gold". Usually I smile at them and shake my head. A month or two later they're back asking why they haven't healed, and why it hurts. Smiling, I say: "go to the place which pierced you". They reply: "no, that guy seemed a bit dodgy". Would you let someone you thought was 'a bit dodgy' pierce you?

A woman who'd been pierced three days earlier came in asking for a shorter tongue barbell as she said it was rubbing the bottom of her mouth. Explaining that this was very common, and would cease to be a problem once the swelling went down, she said: "I shouldn't have to wait! I'm taking it out and getting it re-pierced somewhere else". I guess we're the only piercing studio in the world that makes tongues swell when we pierce them, right? Tongue piercings are actually one of the quicker healing piercings. I wanted to tell her how long my conch and cartilage orbitals hurt, and how many times I'd caught them on my sweater and pulled it, how many nights I had trouble sleeping on freshly pierced ears. If you can't handle 3 days of mild discomfort, then you really shouldn't be getting pierced.

Stretching any piercing is a long process. You cannot go from a 1.6mm piercing to a 4mm in just days. Many people come in to get their ears and certain other piercings tapered. However, many people try to stretch too much too quickly, because they're impatient, or because they resent paying for each plug size on the way up. Yes, it is possible to go up a couple of gauges- but it isn't generally recommended. I wouldn't recommend going any more than 2mm above your normal size by conventional stretching. If you're desperate to get bigger, then dermal punching is your best bet. Most people, though, shy away from scalpeling any of their piercings, and just want to taper them. I've seen some horrible blow-outs, simply because the person couldn't wait to go up a size or two... The result? Piercings that look bad, and take forever to heal. A piercer down the road from our studio stretched a girl's conch from 1.6mm to 5mm at once. She came in to our studio (because "we have a better selection of jewelry, but we're too expensive to get pierced at" � even though we'll taper your piercing for free if you buy our jewelry) and showed us her conch, which now has keloid scarring, and is refusing to heal. She says she doesn't like the way her ear looks now, and she thinks it is infected. We advised her to go to the hospital.

Patience is important when it comes to modification, whether it is waiting until you're of age to be pierced, waiting to wear a special kind of jewelry, waiting for it to heal, or waiting to stretch up to a larger size. If you aren't patient, you won't get the results you want, and you'll probably regret it. So wait until you're legal, wait until your piercing has healed to stick new jewelry in it, wait out any discomfort, and wait until your piercing has completely healed after stretching. If you're patient, you'll most likely be happy with the results, and realize it was worth it after all.

 
Erynn-Elisabeth 
[email protected] 
Classix Piercing, York, England