I had been thinking about getting a piercing for a few years, but wanted to wait until I was legally old enough to get pierced without having parental permission; my mom was awfully strict when it came to me doing anything out of the ordinary and my father was too laid back to ever bother to argue with her. So, a week after my eighteenth birthday, I finally decided to get a Marilyn. It seemed like the best choice for my face shape and mostly everyone agreed with me.
At A Glance Author breigh Contact magentastarrs@yahoo.com When A month ago Artist Chantal Studio Evolutions Body Piercing Location Providence, RI After giving my family the respective warning (I still wanted a house to live in after I got it done,) I went to Evolutions with my two best friends; one who can't stand needles and the other who wanted to watch every step of the process before she had a piercing of her own done. I had my ID checked and was prepped for the whole process. The woman at the desk told how to clean it, what not to eat, what not to drink, what not to smoke (which was really the hardest thing I had to do; I've been smoking for nearly five years) and then I went into the room with Melissa to finally have it done. My biggest fear was getting a piercing so close to my lip because I had my upper lip torn by a dog when I was eight years old and had had several plastic surgeries to correct it and have the scarring removed.
Chantal told me the same things that the woman at the desk had told me and then had me rinse my mouth out with mouthwash. Then she cleaned off the top of my lip and made nine marks for me to choose from. I ended up choosing the mark highest and farthest away from my lip (with Mel's help, of course.) Then she told me to lie back and look in the other direction. She put the clamp on, had me breathe in and put the needle through as I released. I didn't see the needle, but it didn't hurt half as much as I thought it would. It felt more like pinching sunburn, or cutting yourself than anything else. The clamp actually hurt more than the actual piercing. My eye watered, but I figured that was probably common with facial piercing.
The reactions to my Marilyn were just as I expected. People liked it, and even those who were unsure of it warmed up to it pretty quickly. It became known as "the new edition to the family," and everyone wanted to "meet Marilyn." My right-wing conservative mother didn't even have anything extremely negative to say about it, although she did make a special "coffee run" to Starbucks, where I was visiting a friend, only an hour or so after I got it done to see what it looked like. She pretended to be disgusted by it at first, but I knew her curiosity was piqued, because she kept asking questions about it.
I did accidentally hit the piercing while I was washing my face the first night after I got it done. I was scared that I may have ripped it out, but it was just a little red. It took some getting used to at first; I had to pat my face dry rather than following my usual low-maintenance routine and quickly wiping my face off. But after a while it became normal to me.
Cleaning it hasn't been an issue. I'm obsessive about fighting against infection – I can't possibly imagine something festering so close to my mouth – so it was totally normal to be cleaning it as often as I was told to. Not much crust gathered around the piercing, but it did swell quite a bit & during the night it would sometimes bleed and gather around the jewelry. It cleaned off easily enough and stopped after a week and a half and then I just had to deal with cleaning out the whitish goo (for lack of a better word) that didn't ooze out of the piercing itself. The hardest thing to deal with was not being able to smoke for the first two weeks. I started again after the swelling had gone done and it swelled up a little bit the first time, but has been fine since then.
I've had the piercing for almost a month now and I am still very happy with it and I've gotten a lot of compliments about it. A lot of people thought it was possible that I would have trouble getting a job or into a decent college, but I haven't had a single problem so far and I feel that the experience was totally worth it. I would recommend a Marilyn piercing to anyone who has been thinking about getting it done, or is unsure what kind of piercing he or she wants.