I guess that I should start out by saying that, since I was young (7 or 8), I have always had an interest in body modification in terms of tattoos and pierced ears and always planned on getting them myself. My mom was pretty accepting of my decision to eventually do this, but she always told me I would have to wait until I was 18. About three months ago around the middle of July 2006, I gave into my impatience and decided to pierce my ears. I knew I wasn't going to get into an actual piercing studio or any other place that does it professionally because of the lack of my parents approval (just my mom... my dads cool about piercings and tattoos), so I mentioned my situation to one of my friends and she said she would do it. She has more piercings in her ears than any other person I know so I trusted she knew what she was doing. Therefore, when my first chance came to secretly get my ears pierced I took it. I drove to my friends house on a day my mom was out of town, took my friend up to the mall to help me pick out some cool 14g body jewelry, then after that she pierced my ears in the back seat of my car in the mall parking lot. I remember being so nervous right before the needle was coming at me because I was obsessing about the fact that a sharp metal object was about to pierce a part of my body and come out through the other end. I thought my ears were going to pour out blood and I was going to faint right there in the back of my car. I didn't really let on (at least I tried not to let on) to my being a pussy at that moment so I just said "push that fucking thing through" and she did with no blood and pretty much no pain. I was disappointed because I wanted to justify the shit load of terror I had felt just moments before.
At A Glance Author Davy Jones Contact Davy Jones@bme.anon When Three months ago Artist my friend pierced them and i stretched them So, I got my ears pierced and my plan had worked perfectly, then I realized... Fuck! How will I hide these from my mom? Well, my efforts to cover them up with a beanie went over pretty well, but eventually my mom became curious as to why I had been wearing a beanie 24/7 for the past 2 weeks and she found out when she yanked it off my head. She was not as mad as I had expected she would be (probably because I was turning 18 the next month) and she decided to tell all her friends, when they would ask about my ears, that she gave me my birthday present early. I was pretty satisfied with my pierced ears, but I guess I started to get bored with them because I wanted something different. Maybe subconsciously I wanted a stronger reaction from my mom. I decided I was going to gauge them to about 4's or 2's because it was something to do during the rest of the summer and also because the girl who pierced my ears said it would look really hot...
It took about 2 months of stretching, but I would not recommend doing what I did to anyone since both my ears got infected twice during the process because of the stress of stretching too fast. My stretches went from 14g to 10g to 8g to 4g to 2g to 0g to 00g then back to 0g with about a week in between some stretches and sometimes only a day. I had previously thought I would stop at 4's or 2's but I pretty much became addicted to stretching my ears. It wasn't until my mom and my friends told me they feared I was going to look like those "crazy people from the African tribes" that I decided to stop just to show them I could control this new addiction. Because of my lack of money and because I'm cheap I did not go out and buy tapers and jewelry in different sizes. I just made tapers and plugs out of polymer clay and I would sand them down after I baked them until they were the right gauge. It was cool because the clay fortunately didn't irritate my ears a lot. It's also cool because you can mix some flesh tone colors to match your skin perfectly and make plugs that most people wouldn't even realize were there. Those thick Mcdonald's straws also work well as 0g tunnels.
Towards the end of my stretching (when I was at 4's), I was at the family values tour concert at Nissan Pavilion and I saw an awesome pair of 0g metal earlets that looked just like the kind M. Shadows from Avenged Sevenfold has. Unfortunately, these things were flared so much on each end that I had to stretch to 00's before I could fit them in. Once they were in, I was satisfied and decided to stop stretching.
My gauged ears have totally made me stand out at school much more than I realized they would. I go to a prep school and I'm the only guy there who has pierced ears. I'm also the only person in the entire school who has gauged ears. Most people I talk to have no idea what gauging is and have never seen it (my school has many sheltered kids) so I get to explain the process about 5 times a day. I keep on getting the "so are you going stretch them out really huge like the tribes people do?" question, and I also get a bunch of people who are always asking if they can insert pens and pencils etc. into my 0g holes. I don't mind, I think it's pretty funny when I see their eyes light up in amazement after I shove a pencil through the hole. After everything I have learned, I would say that anyone who plans to gauge their ears should not rush it because I'm lucky my ears turned out okay. I would also like to point out that if you go to a sheltered prep school be prepared to get a shit load of questions about gauging and many people asking to stick pencils in your ear.