Body piercing is a great way to show off your cool accessories and express your bold personality. However, it also comes with some common risks and hazards that can easily turn your piercing experience into a nightmare.
To ensure that you have the safest and trouble-free experience, stay away from these common piercing mistakes.
1. Getting Pierced with a Gun
Ask any reliable and well-experienced piercing artist, they will always advise against the use of the gun to punch holes in your skin. First of all, piercing guns cannot be properly sterilized. A single gun can come in contact with hundreds of bodies and can be a source of contamination and infection.
Secondly, the gunshot causes more trauma to the pierced area as it forces a piece of jewelry to pierce through your skin. As a result, it often leads to pain and scarring.
2. Not Choosing a Trained Professional for the Job
You should never choose inexperienced piercers that have set up piercing kiosks at malls and other public places. Always go for a proper piercing shop run by a trained and reliable professional who takes care of general hygiene and disinfection and uses safe equipment and metals to get the piercing done.
3. Not Cleaning or Over-Cleaning the Piercing
Good piercing aftercare requires that you keep the piercing clean and do not touch it unnecessarily. The best way to clean fresh piercings is by using saline compresses or gently wiping them with rock salt solution. This should be done twice a day. Over-cleaning the piercing will also be harmful as the healing process gets disturbed every time you touch the pierced area.
4. Twisting the Jewelry to Remove Crusted Secretions
Early body piercers used to recommend people to keep twisting their piercing jewelry every once in a while to break away crusties and keep your skin from growing over the jewelry or rejecting it. This is a dangerous practice based n misinformation. You need to leave your jewelry alone as much as possible and give it time to heal by itself.
This means you need to resist the urge to touch, twist, or play with your jewelry otherwise you will keep irritating the delicate skin and prolong the healing process. A clean and soft cloth soaked in rock saltwater can be used to dab away any crusted secretions around the piercing.
5. Changing the Jewelry Too Soon
You may feel excited to try out new piercing jewelry especially if there’s an occasion coming up, but please don’t do that! Premature removal of jewelry can close the piercing or make it difficult for you to introduce the new piece of jewelry into the piercing. Give your piercings at least 6 to 8 weeks to properly heal before you can try new jewelry.
