| At A Glance | |
| Author | 2HVDE |
| When | Ten years ago or more |
We came by an ear piercing booth in some department store and a couple of us decided to take the plunge. I'll interject at this point that this happened a long time ago, and none of us had much concept that piercing studios even existed -- although my girlfriend had just gotten back from a trip visiting family in San Francisco and had watched a girl puking in the bushes after getting her tongue pierced (not that I entirely believed her). Anyway, I mention this because what I am about to recount should not be repeated -- ear piercing guns are not safe for a myriad of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it is very easy to spread hepatitis and other diseases with them.
Anyway, their pricing was such that you had to get two piercings done; I'd wanted to put both of the cheap gold plated studs through my cartilage at the top of my ear, but store policy wouldn't let them. So, since I was drunk and not really thinking about what I wanted, I let the "ear piercing technician" pop one through my left ear, and the other through my also-drunk buddy's left ear. The procedure is barely even worth talking about; it consisted of sit in the chair, look at the dot that just got drawn on my ear, say "yup", and pop -- it's done. It didn't hurt at all, and they sent us on our way (no aftercare or anything like that was given).
Healing of my piercing was pretty uneventful. I put alcohol and peroxide on it, and it healed without problems in what seemed like a couple weeks. My friend gave his up a just few days after getting it pierced though, and gave me the stud which I pushed through my ear cartilage in the bathroom with a little ice. Again, I'm recounting things that I would never do now, but they are true nonetheless. I don't think I even thought about the possibility that I might get a disease from sharing jewelry, but considering how much Dettol I used to clean both my jewelry and my ear, I suspect I killed any that came my way. In any case, none of us had had surgery, and we were all virgins except me so the risk was certainly minimal.
Over the next eight months or so I pierced my ears, including the right one (still a big taboo back then, at least in the small town I lived in), at least a dozen more times. All this time I was wearing cheap mall studs and gold hoops through the piercings. I noticed one day that in my older piercings I could put two of the gold sleepers through the earlobe piercing, but never really put more than two or three in the piercing, and didn't really consider that stretching it was an option (although my parents had a coffee table book that showed the Massai stretching their ears, so perhaps the idea was germinating).
Scholastically I focussed most of my efforts in my art classes, and I was reading a lot about experimental and performance art, especially performance art of the l970s and early 1980s which pushed the body's limits. The escalation of my artistic experimentation certainly played a role in the development of my interest in body modification -- my high school art submissions went from cooking meals on burning paintings, to building huge sculptures and torching them, finally to burning raccoons on the lawn of the school's vice-principal. You'd think this would get me expelled, but instead I ended up graduating with a 100% grade in art, and something like a 95% overall average in my grades putting me at the top of my class and earning me a number of scholarships. Anyway, after torching the raccoon (which I should add was found as roadkill and not murdered by me), we were sitting in my friend's basement wondering what to do next when I noticed their mother's knitting needles.
I picked up a knitting needle that was probably about 8ga or 6ga; one of the smaller needles. The needle of course had a wonderful rounded taper, and it was coated with some kind of plastic so it was very smooth. I'm not sure what made me think it would be a good idea to put it in my ear, but something almost instinctual inside me made me push it through. It hurt a tiny bit -- logically I must have torn my ear at least a little even though I remember no blood -- but to be honest it was largely pain free. I wore the needle for an hour or so, and then took it out when I got home (I wasn't about to steal my friend's mother's needles!).
Over the next few months I absolutely cannibalized my mother's knitting needles. Using bolt cutters I cut them all into one inch sections of all different diameters, and I used their tips to make tapers. I quickly used these to stretch my ears to about 00ga by putting in a slightly different (and slightly larger) assortment of rods every few days. It didn't look great -- my ear looked like a junkyard -- but the ear itself stretched easily and quickly. I found a metal spacer cylinder on a pen that fit my ear nicely and had myself a tunnel. Like I said, this was before you could buy tunnels, and luckily my body is resilient. People started coming up to me and asking to take my picture; they'd never seen anything like this in person.
It wasn't long before I decided I wanted to go bigger, so I shoved in more of my little metal rods. I'd have six or seven of them shoved through the hole to build up to the next size -- sizing was determined by the objects I found. I'd cut up magic markers, small pull bottles, and any round object I could find. When I left high school to pursue art college I was at around 5/8", using a section of the plastic body of an oversized pen if I remember right. My lobe was thick, healthy, and had no signs of damage -- quite remarkable given how quickly and recklessly I'd stretched.
I then discovered electrical tape. Every day I'd add another wrap of it to increase the size of my plugs. The only problem I had with that was because I wore the plugs always, including in the shower, the glue on the electrical tape would ooze out and irritate the tissue. As I said though, my body is very non-reactive and I seem to be one of the lucky few who didn't have a problem. Six months later I was at an inch.
Another six months and I was at an inch and a half, and found a nice clear plastic bottle that was exactly the right size to fit (I've includeed a picture of this below). I cut a cylinder out with scissors, and the clear plastic plug looked beautiful in my ear -- I even considered getting a blackwork tattoo on the inside of the piercing that I could show off while wearing this plug. However, it didn't turn out quite so well... I reached this point in my stretching at the height of summer, and would spend long periods sitting on the outdoor patios of various restaurants on nice days. Common sense will tell you what happens when light is shone through a curved clear material. Common sense will tell you what happens when sensitive skin is exposed to extended periods of sun... combine the two and you've got a problem!
The clear plug seems to have acted as a magnifying glass, and I found myself with a horrible, horrible sunburn on the inside of my earlobe. It literally burned all the skin off the inside... my ear became a horrible bloody mess and I was forced to put in much smaller jewelry and restretch. However, in doing this I learned a very interesting lesson -- by stretching the ear, damaging it, and then unstretching and restretching it, the "bulk" of the lobe is increased. Even though my lobe had always been healthy, by the time I re-reached an inch and a half it had bulked up significantly.
At this point I was looking very lopsided, since I'd only ever stretched my left ear. My right ear was still quite tiny, so I decided it was about time to get it caught up. Using a two millimetre (I think that's about 12ga) dermal punch, we knocked a hole in my right earlobe and immediately put in 6ga jewelry (in hindsight we could have put in 4ga).
By now I had access to a lathe and plastic, and was able to carve myself dozens of step-sized tapers which I used to stretch that ear very quickly up to match. A year later my right ear was already over an inch in size, and my left ear was at two inches. Another year and they were both stable at two inches, and that's where they've been for the past six or seven years, and probably will be for the rest of my life.
And to think, all this thanks to MC Hammer.
Appendix
I don't have much in the way of pictures of my ears, especially from while I was early in my stretching, but I did manage to find a couple (and I have sent in more that are in the various galleries on BME):
