At A Glance Author Neurot1k Contact Neurot1k@bme.anon When Two years ago Artist me Studio the mall, then later in my friend's bathroom Location omaha, ne, us I am about to tell a story that many in my local modified community have straight up denied the plausibility of. It is true, though, so I'm telling you anyway. About 2 1/2 or 3 years ago I honestly was not much up to par with body modification or the standards for the vast (and I use this term loosely) majority of it. I had been into a couple of shops around town with friends, but I had only gotten my cartilage done (x4) and my eyebrow inside of any of them, so I hadn't experienced anything past the usual realm of general piercing (I had, however, pierced my own lip twice and my lobes about four times by then). So naturally, when the idea of stretching my lobes out came to me I didn't have much info on it, and at the time I was too lazy and under the influence too often for Google to occur to me, let alone bum a ride to a shop and ask a living, breathing person about it. Who would have thought that a piercer would know, huh? We all make mistakes I suppose...
Anyway, enough rambling. I wasn't quite sure what gauge I wanted to stretch to, so I just went to the mall to see what the kiosks and stores like Spencer's and Hot Topic had. I grabbed a pair of 0g "acrylic" tapers off of Hot Topic's shelf and headed to the bathroom to find a mirror but saw some hanging on the walls at Pac Sun on the way. I decided to stretch them in front of those mirrors because my girlfriend was with and she wanted to watch. I did have a little common-sense with the stretching procedure, though. I had started stretching it (it started off at a 16g) by putting one of my 14g tongue barbells in each lobe, then a 14g and a 16g, then two 14g's, and so on until I had three or four 14g's in each -- I don't quite remember. (I strongly advise anyone and everyone against stretching any piercing, no matter how extreme you are stretching it, while under the influence of any substance whatsoever. Even if you are only stretching to the next size, shit happens, and not being able to notice when it does surely isn't going to help your situation).
Basically, I took the o-rings off of the taper, took the barbells out of my right lobe, stuck the (blunt) end of the taper in the pseudo-10g-ish hole, and started shoving it through. Luckily for me I found out at this point that my skin is apparently very resilient, my friend Cassie attributes it to all skinny people somehow.. The dry taper went right through to the end in (what seemed to me as) about 3 minutes. I put the o-rings back on, took out the left barbells, and shoved that one through in about 5 minutes. I highly recommend that nobody ever attempt stretching their piercings this way. I hadn't even heard of the term "blowout" at this point in time, but I was damn well lucky I didn't have any. I basically put the barbells back in their containers and walked out as the guy at the register (with about half-inch lobes) stared at me as if I had an extra arm sprouting out of my sternum or something. I wonder why.
Over the next couple of days my lobes were swollen like inner tubes and extremely red, but barely bled at all. Not even enough to seep out from underneath the o-rings. My cleaning procedure consisted of rubbing off the crusties with a Q-tip soaked in warm water. Somehow, they healed fine and I got some nice stainless steel 00 gauge eyelets for them, which I kept in up until March (the 16th to be exact) of this year when the steel had stretched my lobes out naturally to 1/2". Cassie then gave me a pair of 9/16" Kaos silicones (which I simply folded and stuck in my lobes in her bathroom). My lobes look gorgeous to this day (after stretching from 1/2" to 9/16" with the silicones) and are still round and smooth, instead of that "cat's butt hole" look you so often see with many people's lobes when they take their jewellery out.
Again, I stress that this experience was not written in promotion of shoving a taper through your ear to have lobes 5 gauges bigger than you did 5 minutes prior to doing so. This would result in blowouts in the vast majority of anyone who tried this method of stretching. I've just come to know my skin since this experience and have found that I can do this with ease (ie: my 14g-4g stretch with a hematite pincher). This is basically just to share my experience with the community and see if anyone else has had an experience anything like mine.