Genital piercings

Some people find genital piercings empowering, for others the motivation is sexual and some people simply find these piercings pretty. Whatever your motivation, you then have to find the right piercer to do it for you.

So what should you be looking for? The first thing people tend to say is you need to find an experienced piercer. Well I agree experience is a good thing but I don’t actually think that this is what you should focus on.

You need to find a piercer who is technically competent but more importantly, will deal with you sensitively, comfortably and professionally both when talking to you and also when performing the actual piercing.

Most genital piercings are technically very straightforward and easier to perform than even some ear piercings. The difficult part is overcoming embarrassment.        

Also, your piercer will have to discuss aftercare with you which will include talking about sex and toilet habits. Aftercare is so important with genital piercings!

We have a private studio and you are welcome to bring a trusted friend with you. If you want to come alone, I always have a female assistant with me when I do genital and nipple piercings, as a matter of course.

You are welcome to make an appointment to come and visit us and discuss your piercing and suitable jewellery without any commitment (or cost) to having it done. Previous customers have really appreciated this.

PiercerJack

To numb or not to numb

Piercing can be anything from mildly uncomfortable to very painful, depending on a number of factors including which body part is being pierced and your state of mind. For some people the pain is a rite of passage, for others the prospect of pain puts them off having a much desired piercing. If the piercing environment is calm and your piercer is relaxed, you are more likely to be relaxed and the experience will be more comfortable. The actual piercing (and the pain directly associated with it) is over in a fraction of a second and any tenderness you feel afterwards should be just that, tenderness.

Pain is caused by the stimulation of pain receptors at the ends of nerves. The stimulation causes sodium to enter the nerve ending which causes an electrical signal to build up in the nerve. When this signal is big enough it passes along the nerve to the brain where this signal is interpreted as pain.

So how do you stop it?

Freeze sprays (or vapocoolants)

This is a type of aerosol spray product that contains a liquefied gas (usually ethyl chloride) which, when sprayed onto the skin, causes rapid cooling thereby making the skin less sensitive; it is however not an anaesthetic and when used on open wounds it can cause skin burns and lead to other irritations.

Some freeze sprays work a little too well; freeze sprays can be used for treating warts or skin tags and they work by freezing tissue to the extent that the tissue is destroyed so that the wart or skin tag eventually just falls off.

Personally, I am not a big fan of freeze sprays because there is a risk of damaging the skin just at the time it needs to be at its most resilient.

Local anaesthetics

Local anaesthetics include an active ingredient which might be lidocaine, tetracaine, prilocaine (or other something-caines). These work by temporarily stopping sodium entering the nerve ending at the site of the injury, thus preventing an electrical signal building up and passing along the nerve fibres to the brain.

These local anaesthetics can be applied by a spray or by a cream. In my experience the sprays work well only inside the mouth where the active ingredient is absorbed quickly in the soft tissue. For all external piercings it is the cream that works best (but only when applied correctly and for long enough). I have found that customers who have even chosen a piercing which is generally recognised as being intensely painful find the experience quite comfortable when properly numbed.

If the piercing pain is part of the pleasure then that’s all good. But if the prospect of pain puts you off the pleasure of having the area pierced then fear not, there is something we can do.

Please tell us at the time you book the appointment if you want numbing cream. It will add £2 to the cost of your piercing.

Changing your piercing jewellery

Your piercing has healed and you're ready to replace the initial piercing jewellery with some gorgeous piece you've found. What do you do?

First of all, you need to be sure that your piercing has healed COMPLETELY which for many piercings can take 9 months or even more. It must no longer be secreting anything or getting crusty or be at all tender. You've waited this long, don't mess up by going too early!

Your initial jewellery should have been titanium (or at the very least, surgical steel), metals which are likely to more hypoallergenic than your replacement jewellery. So, when you put the new piece in, you really want the skin to be healed so that the scar tissue is well established enough that the impurities in the new jewellery won't irritate. And remember, even gold can be an irritant. 

The most important thing therefore is to be patient.

Secondly, be aware of the gauge and size of your current jewellery before buying a replacement piece. Don't make the mistake of assuming that something will fit your piercing because it looks nice! (You may need to ask your piercer for help on this - he/she will easily be able to tell you what you need to be looking for).

Thirdly, don't take the old piece out until you are actually going to put the new one in. It is truly astonishing how quickly a hole will shrink and what should have been a straightforward replacement can turn into a very uncomfortable experience.

Then you need to decide if you can see and access the piercing well enough to do it yourself. Some types of jewellery are really fiddly to put in, some places (like a daith) are tricky and some need special tools. If you don't think it will be straightforward, don't try!

If you’re happy to swap over the jewellery yourself, go for it. If you’re not, get some help! At PiercerJack we provide a jewellery fitting service for £5 (or we'll do it for nothing if you are getting another piercing). Contact us here to make an appointment.

Piercing Guns and why you should avoid them.

Why oh why do parents take their little darlings to retail shops to get their ears pierced with a gun? Don’t get me started!

Having a piercing involves deliberately creating a wound in the flesh, a wound that you want to heal with the minimum of fuss.

That earring post that you can feel protruding through the butterfly clip has just punched a hole in your daughter’s ear lobe. It’s blunt, obviously, (otherwise it would be dangerous afterwards) but imagine what happens when you hammer a blunt object through cartilage. There is inevitably some splatter (the flesh has to go somewhere) and typically some of that splattered flesh ends up on the piercing gun. Much is made of the fact that the jewellery used in a piercing gun is sterile (sure) but the gun itself is never sterilised (it would melt in an autoclave). You cannot be sure that none of the dozens/hundreds of children who went before were carrying an infection, including Hepatitis B or C.

What about the wound the piercing gun makes? There are no clean edges which means that it is harder to heal and there is likely to be more scar tissue in the hole. Furthermore, the body’s typical reaction to blunt force trauma is to flood the area with blood and other antobodies which means the earlobe will swell. But the butterfly clip is rammed up against the back of the ear so it has nowhere to go.

In the worst cases, the butterfly clip gets embedded into the ear (as shown in the picture alongside where all you can see is the tip of the butterfly, the rest has been consumed by the ear).

What you can be sure about is that any swelling will be painful in the days that follow and it is almost inevitable. Why do this?

By contrast, a piercing needle is incredibly sharp and is hollow; in fact it’s really a hollow scalpel and it cuts the flesh surgically, leaving super clean edges along the wound. It’s pretty obvious that a wound like this will heal much more cleanly than the battered hole left by a blunt pole rammed through the ear.

The healing process we are looking for in a freshly pierced wound is that the body forms a channel between the entry and exit of the piercing. What happens is that over time the body lays down scar tissue along the channel of the wound and once healed, this will be secure and (relatively) smooth and will allow the insertion and removal of jewellery at will. This process is assisted by the clean edges of the surgically created hole that a piercing needle makes and is hindered by the mess that the piecing gun makes.

Finally, with a piercing made with a needle, you can size the jewellery to fit the ear (and it is good practice to allow 2mm extra for swelling) and the best piercers only use titanium jewellery which is the most hypoallergenic and smoothest of materials.

Needless to say at PiercerJack we only use titanium for initial piercings (which can also come in gold and black) and have a range of pretty jewels to choose from. You can see some of our jewellery here. Oh and we never use guns!

Use this link to contact us.