At A Glance Author agreenplateau Contact agreenplateau@bme.anon When A week ago Artist Stephen DeToma Studio Anomaly Location Pasadena, CA Piercings have never really been my thing. I've always thought of myself as a tattoo girl, true to ink in all it's forms. The only piercings I really had were my ears. My fiancee is a definite piercing addict, so after we hooked up at the beginning of our relationship, we turned one another on to our favorite mods. I took him to a tattoo shop and got him his first tattoo. He took me to a piercing shop and got me a christina genital piercing. That one didn't work out so well, so I took it out and abandoned piercings for a while.
After a few months though, the itch to get a piercing hit me again. One of the guys who worked at my piercing studio had a vertical in his lip, so I decided I'd go for that. But, after checking in with my work, I found out I wasn't allowed to have facial piercings. So I needed to figure something else out. I didn't want a surface piercing, and I didn't want to get a genital piercing again. I went down to my shop and asked my piercer, Stephen, what would be suitable for me. He suggested an ear project.
"Oh, like an industrial?"
"Kind of, but not really."
He went on to explain the different kind of ear projects that could happen. Stephen told me I had great shaped ears and that we could do alot of different things. Him being the piercer, I said that he could choose what he thought was best. In this case, he said that a vertical industrial, going through my conch and coming out the top of my helix would be awesome. He sketched it out for me, and after little delibaration, I said ok. We discussed different gauges and he told me that a larger gauge would be more comfortable. I agreed and we decided upon a 12 gauge bar, appx. an inch and a half long.
Stephen went and got everything set up, the autoclave with the jewelry and needles, and had me fill out the standard forms. I wasn't the least bit nervous, so I thought it would go beautifully. I hopped into the piercing chair, and went through the preliminary swabbing, marking, re-marking, cleaning, ect.
I knew this was going to go well, beacause Stephen was really taking his time with everything. The first piercing that he said he was going to do was my conch, because it was going to be the most painful one of the two. He had me start my deep breaths, and on the third one, he pushed the needle through. I could hear the crunch as it went through my conch, and somehow, it kind of got stuck in the middle for a minute, but with a little pressure, it went all the way through. It was probably the worst pain in a piercing I've experienced. As he pushed the jewelry through, the pain subsided, and I felt better. The next piercing was the one that was to go through my helix. He had to re-mark me to adjust the angles. After he checked, and re-checked it, he picked up the next needle, and had me start my breathing. When he pushed the needle though on the third breath, it barely felt like anything. A simple procedure compared to my conch.
But through the procedure, it seemed that the bar that he had picked to put through my piercing was a tad bit short, so he took another bar that he burned with the needles and the jewelry, and he proceeded to change the bars. When he was pushing the bar through my conch, it started bleeding profusely, because of the open hole. Blood was running down my neck, on my shirt, filling up my ear canal. Luckily, he got it all under control and had the jewelry in the hole quickly.
I was covered in blood, sore as hell, and totally drained. He added the finishing touch: a spike on the top of the helix, instead of a regular ball. He cleaned me up, swabbed off the jewelry, and I got up to take a look. In short, I was ecstatic. It looked so cool, so unique, totally badass. I walked out of that studio feeling like a million bucks.
I couldn't sleep on that ear that night, and for another week to come. It swelled a bit, but it was really giving me no problems, and I couldn't stop staring at it. This was like no other standard industrial. People would ask me where the bar went through and when I showed them, almost everyone winced and told me they could never do something like that.
Soon after, Stephen put a photo of my piercing in his portfolio, and he told me that many people have asked for the same piercing. I definitely started some sort of industrial revolution.