| At A Glance | |
| Author | Katze |
| Contact | Katze@bme.anon |
| IAM | Katzefer |
| When | Three months ago |
| Artist | Myself |
| Studio | Home |
| Location | Dundee, Scotland |
I kept looking on pictures of conches on BME checking mines was healing fine and just being generally a nosey person. I also came across some larger gauge conches, and at first I wasn't to sure how I felt about them, but I thought to myself that I would never do that to my conch piercing, it was just too beautiful. I was however intrigued and kept checking out these pics of giant conches and read some experiences on how they were done, mostly dermal punched. Now dermal punching was something I wasn't to familiar with, but after some reading up on it I settled with the opinion of "looks good, but nobodies going near me with a circular scalpel!"
One day sitting in my room I was noseying through my collection of tapers, tunnels and rings looking for a change of plug for my lobes (about ½" at this time I think) and I came across my first little stretching crescent and remembered when I first got it, then I got a strange urge to stick it in my (now fully healed) conch. I quickly shook this feeling off remembering how I didn't want to "ruin" my wonderful conch. I got this urge a few other times but never acted on it, until one day, sometime before my exams when I had spent all day studying and getting told I would fail by teachers and parents unless I studied ever spare moment. The stress was messing with my head and one of the best and safest ways I've figured how to deal with this is pierce or stretch. Sadly there isn't a piercing shop in the middle of the country open at 10pm, so I got out that damned crescent that I swear was calling on me! I took the crescent into the bathroom, washed my hands , cleaned the crescent and my ear, and rubbed some cocoa butter formula into my conch. The moment of truth came and, expecting horrible, horrible pain, I stick the crescent through and felt...nothing, apart from the feeling of having a big chunk of metal in my ear! It was pretty tough getting through cartilage and I had to push pretty hard, so I was expecting lots of pain but I was surprised how easy and pain free it was so set off to bed, with all my stresses lifted up, for now.
I woke up the next morning with a thudding headache and was pretty tempted to skive the day off school seeing as I'd been having a pretty rough month. But I know how I can easily fall down a slippery slope like that and got up, thinking only of my great (not) exam results I could only get by going to school. I got to school and proudly showed my conch to my friends and they all gasped, asking "How sore was that!?" and telling me I was crazy, but I told them of my surprise that it was soo pain free. I got home and my head was still thumping and I finally figured that it was my conch. After about 2 days the sore head stopped and I just had a cool big-ass conch. Sadly 3.2mm was getting old and boring and picking up my 4mm taper I went into the bathroom again, coming out with a bigger conch. The same happened with the sore heads, but it wasn't anything a couple painkillers couldn't fix.
I decided to go up to 6mm since I had a lot of jewellery for 6mm, but there was one problem, I had my exams. Now this might not seem major but the sore heads would not help a studying girl pass her exams! So I made the next stretch, 5mm, when I had about a week left to my next exam, so any sore head would be gone before I really started cramming. The next and final stretch, 6mm, was when I had over a week left till my last exam, which I was really prepared for, so I had no worries about that.
So I'd got to 6mm, my goal size, and I was pretty happy to be rid them damn headaches. One problem, no jewellery. Okay, I said before I had jewellery for 6mm, but none of these were long enough to fit in my conch, but I couldn't stand these tapers any more! They were getting in the way so I got a genius idea. I went down to the kitchen found a plastic stirrer took it into the garage cut it up into about 5cm lengths and took the upstairs cleaned them and cleaned up the edges and put a flare on one end with, erm...my straighteners, and then stuck a o-ring on the other side. It worked pretty well, and after cleaning them again I popped them in my ears, perfect fit.
Its been about 2 months since I finished stretching my conch and I'm ordering some eyelets soon, since I've only came into money lately, but the homemade plug has been a success for now. When I stretched my conch I was pretty stressed out, but the stretching helped me deal with it and cheered me up a lot. The only problem now is whenever I get stressed I want to stretch or get pierced and I'm gonna end up covered in giant piercings! No problem with that though :)
The conch before:
The conch after:
(sorry for the crap quality)