PIERCING REFRESHMENT
At A Glance Author youscratchedthesurface Contact youscratchedthesurface@gmail.com When A month ago Artist me Studio my friends bathroom Location london uk So recently, I've rediscovered piercing. I'm 28 and I had a few in my younger days, which were all taken out along with giving up smoking and settling down with a "nice" girl. Thankfully she's long gone and I got me a nasty girl who likes tattoos and holes and bits of metal.
She had attempted to pierce my ears with the smaller (25, 23, and 21 guage) needles we used for play piercing, but with no success, until we finally got some proper 14-gauge cannula needles from "into you" in Brighton. These worked a treat and I now have a little black horseshoe ring in my left ear, and a bigger 12-gauge horseshoe ring in my right ear.
Apart from those, I have an old 8 guage PA, which funnily enough, the nice girl let me keep (funny what nice girls like), left nipple and septum, all commercially done. These are great, but....
While my wonderful girlfriend was away in the US, I was bored and house sitting alone, and neither the TV or internet in the house I'm sitting were working, so I listened to some music and sucked a few ciders. As I was packing my stuff to meet my girl in the states, I came across a spare 14 gauge needle, and not wanting to waste it, I went into the bathroom and put a 16 gauge horseshoe ring around my lip,just to see how it was going to look. I liked it.
I used a sterile needle straight out of the pack, and just swabbed the ring with a pre-injecting wipe (highly unreccomended, it's stupid to not sterilize your shit properly, but, I guess or at least hope you all know the rules about cleanliness and infection). Probably should have marked out where to put it, but I get a little excited about these things, and just started sticking the needle through in what seemed like a good spot. It hurt a lot less than I had expected, a lot less in fact as the same needle going through my ear. I'm not sure why.
It was totally cool to see the sharp end just start to poke through the inside of my mouth, and then feel the little release as it pushed all the way through. Of course, at this point I was suddenly aware that I had a medium sized hunk of metal hanging off my lip, and no jewellery to put through the hole. So I rushed around for a bit trying to find the spare nosering that I had.
The kind of half felt, half heard sound as the needle is withdrawn with the cannula remaining is probably one of the most curious bodily experiences I have had. And something I plan to repeat more frequently. Because I was doing it in the mirror, and I'm pretty much useless with a lot of manual dexterity based things, I had a little trouble fitting the end of the ring into the end of the cannula properly, but then it all went in, and felt great as I pulled the plastic tube through, leaving the black horseshoe proudly in my now massively bleeding lip. The other problem was that the only jewellery that I could find was missing its balls, so to speak, so I took them off my septum piercing, which is gonna look a bit lame until I can get some new ones.
The swelling has so far (1 day later) not been nearly as bad as I had expected, and it's nowhere near as crusty as my ears. eating is a little tricky, just because it's still quite tender, and it has bled a few times when I've knocked it about.
Most importantly, though, is that it looks great, and I have a sense of achievement at having done it myself.
After a week at burning man in the Nevada desert without doing much in the way of care or aftercare:
Wow, it got disgusting on the playa, the air is so dry that it just crusted up into one big stinkin mess, but then so did my ear piercings, which I was sure had totally healed.I don't think they are infected, just got a bit weepy and that dried into dirty crusty gunk. still here's a little warning folks. Make sure you think ahead when you put holes in your own face. Don't do it if you are heading straight off to the high desert. It pays to be somewhere you can clean em up good with the salt water.
Also the hole has begun to heal bigger than the jewellery. Probably because I used a bigger needle and haven't bothered to get bigger jewellery, but I think this may have contributed to it being a bit more crusty and foul than it needed to be.