Earstretching.net

gotta rant. why is it that people think that they can neglect their new piercing(s) and it'll heal up nice and fine? i don't understand this mentality. my sister had her tragus pierced before christmas... she's a normally responsible person, she's got a respectable job, yet she only bothered looking after this piercing for a couple of weeks, ignored the advice i gave her about how to clean it, then just left it. now when she comes round to my house, it's inflamed and painful. i ask her how she's taking care of it, she says she stopped cleaning it for a while but now she's doing it once a day. while staying over for the night, she briefly dabbed at it with some cotton and saltwater, and muttered painfully 'stupid ear', as if it was the ear's fault. i had to bite my tongue, because it's like there's no point in saying anything: when i attempted to give her some advice a few weeks back, she just rolled her eyes at me. and at one point she said 'if it gets infected i'll just get a shot of antibiotics' because apparantly her friend did the same with a navel piercing...

i've had upwards of twenty piercings over the years, and i've treated them all with respect and proper care, and i can't understand why some people have such an inattentive and negligent attitude towards something that they've put in their body and could potentially cause serious health problems.

Indeed. While we are on the topic of caring for piercings, i have a hard time understanding why people choose to be negligent from the start. I have a friend who did a bunch of research on piercers but, when it came down to it, she went with a discount piercer with minimal experience just because it was cheap. She saved $5 or $10 on the whole thing. Now she isn't caring for it properly either.

Why choose to do things wrong from the start? Is $10 worth the risk to your health? It's right up there with not being willing to spend 20 minutes a day to care for your healing wound properly.

My sis is kinda the same way, I actively take care of my lobes. They are my babies, hers are smaller a 2g but the only maintenance she does with them is cleans them in the shower and when its a fresh stretch she will do sss on them but she does massage or oil them or let them go nakey or little bits of time either. It irratates me but they are her ears, I guess she didn't realize the stretching takes a little more than she thought. But she recently got spider bites and she doesn't really do anything with them and since she has a cold now its even worse and its taking longer for them to heal and for her to get better.

Honestly, piercings don't really need as much cleaning as a lot of people think they do. Over-cleaning can actually cause tons of problems. Not saying we should all rub dirt in our piercings and never bother to keep them clean at all, but piercings do pretty well when they're mostly left alone besides the occasional sea salt soak.

theoretically, i can see where you're coming from, but i don't see the evidence for that. when i have a new piercing, i clean it three times a day with a sea salt solution and for the first week or so it gets a daily soak. my piercings have all healed quickly without problems. my sister hardly cleans hers, and it's inflamed and painful and nowhere near healed after several months.

Yeah, I know what you mean. It's just that a lot of people end up doing more harm than good with their aftercare routines. Getting soaks too salty, messing with the jewelry too much, using things that kill healthy cells, etc. can all delay healing quite a bit. I still think over-cleaning was the main reason my eyebrow piercing ended up rejecting; it was my first "real" piercing and I thought it would get infected immediately if I didn't clean it religiously.

Infections are actually rare in piercings and the body is good at healing itself. I don't do much to new piercings anymore other than some saline spray after a shower and a soak if they're really irritated, and I've found my piercings do a lot better. But of course everyone is different.

true enough, you need to find the right balance for your own body. common sense applies to both ends of the spectrum.

Great thread guys...

I guess not so many fans of the litha (leave it the hell alone) method

I know a couple of people who don't care for tattoos properly either!!