I know that this stretch was much quicker than would normally be recommended and I don't believe anyone should push their bodies too quickly when stretching their ears or any other piercing for that matter, so first let me begin with the unique circumstances that allowed me to safely stretch so quickly. My target had always been 1/2 inch even before my ear lobes were pierced and I was luckily able to find a wonderful piercer to scalpel them to 1/2 inch. I was told prior to the scalpelling that scalpelled ears tend to stretch much faster and much easier than normally stretched ones and was able to confirm this with some people that had it done. Many told me that if they left the plugs in continuously even for just a few days the piercings would end up naturally stretching themselves to the point the jewelry would start falling out all the time and for this reason most of them either slept without the plugs in or would periodically remove them during the day. On top of all of this just a couple weeks into the healing time I was forced to downsize to 0g and when this happened the lobes never fully returned to their previous shape leaving them even more elastic than normal. The 0g plugs quickly became loose so I decided to stretch them a home by using a little lube to insert the larger plugs. While this worked just fine I still wanted to find a less traumatic way to stretch my ears.
At A Glance Author Uberkitty IAM Uberkitty When A month ago Artist Self Done Location North Carolina Even though my ears had been 00g for only about 2 weeks they were already painfully lose again. The plugs I had in weren't flared. The o-rings were too big and had the tendency to fall off meaning that these fell out far more frequently than my flared 0g plugs did before. Within 5 days I had already lost an o-ring and it was common for me to wake up in the morning and have to pull all the sheets off my bed in order to find the plugs and o-rings so I could put them back in. Even worse at times I'd be walking down the street and suddenly hear the clink of a plug hitting the pavement. I would have to wait until I was home again to clean it before reinserting the plug and feared the jewelry would soon become scratched. I was leery of stretching again so soon but it seemed that after such a short time my ears were ready for it. I'd heard a lot about stretching with Teflon tape and it seemed to me this gradual method would be the way to go. The only problem was that without a car I really didn't have any means to go to a hardware store to buy the necessary tape. I did however have a brand new roll of electrical tape I'd purchased just a week or two earlier and had heard of it being used as a substitute. After all it's not too tacky and doesn't leave a residue when it's removed. I decided to try it knowing that if it caused me any problems I'd stop stretching them and downsize to 00g again.
The first day I measured out two 3 inch strips of electrical tape and carefully wrapped it around the plugs. I had to stop and unwind it a time or two since it was so difficult to keep straight but in the end all was well. There was some overhang that I decided not to trim flush with the plugs since it kept the tacky edge surface farther from my ears. I massaged my ears with Vitamin E oil and put a little on the newly wrapped plugs as well before inserting them. While it was obviously a snugger fit now I didn't encounter any resistance and didn't feel any pain at all. I was able to use the o-rings as well given they were too big to start with.
The next day I removed the plugs before my afternoon shower (taking a hot shower with tape against my ears seemed like a really bad idea...) Once out I removed the old tape and replaced it with new strips of the same length. As before I used Vitamin E oil to insert them and found this time they weren't nearly as snug as before. Before bed I decided I would be fine to add an additional 2 inches of tape to each plug. Even now at 5 inches of tape they weren't as tight as the 3 inches had been the day before.
The next morning I again found my ears were no longer snuggly fitting over the plugs and so after the shower I removed the 5 inches of tape and replaced them with 7. By this time the o-rings really didn't want to fit over the plugs. I ended up cramming one of them on each plug before putting them in my ears but couldn't find a way to get the other o-ring on once the jewelry was inserted (too much tugging on my poor ears) I figured I would do with what I could get.
That night I went to a movie and midway through the plugs started falling out. I caught one and turned it around so that the single o-ring was now on the opposite side of the ear in hope that that would prevent it from slipping out again. That didn't work. The plugs fell into my lap 3 times within 5 minutes and I ended up spending the rest of the movie holding the plugs in. As soon as I got home I removed the plugs and added 2 more inches of tape (totaling 9 now.) At this point in was impossible to put the o-rings on, even if they weren't in my ears. And even a minute or two into stretch it was obvious that there was no way the plugs would stay in through the night. 9 inches of tape still wasn't enough to be snug and I was now o-ringless. It suddenly occurred to me I should probably measure how large they were. I took out a plug and tried to measure it with a ruler but had trouble getting anything exact so I took out my box of body jewelry and compared it to one of the 1/2 inch eyelets I owned. I was incredibly surprised to find my taped up plugs were 1/2 inch now. I hadn't intended to skip any sizes and had wanted to stop at least a few weeks at 1/16th before moving on. It was too late for that now really since 1/2 inch plugs were loose. I washed, lubed up, folded and inserted the 1/2 inch Kaos eyelets I owned, primarily because I didn't want to deal with o-rings at the moment for fear they'd fall off and I'd loose my jewelry as had happened so frequently. I'm very happy to once again have my ears up to my target size and am glad the stretching went very easy and didn't give me any problems.