By Laurrel Allison
01/21/2018
People with piercings are becoming the norm, especially in the service and hospitality industry. I constantly see salesmen and waitresses rocking super cute piercings. A Lil helix here, a small nose ring there. With Millennials going forward with start-up businesses and entrepreneurship, there’s a much more casual approach to peoples’ appearance. I have piercings. My friends have piercings. My friends’ boyfriends and girlfriends have piercings. It’s a beautiful thing and these people should be celebrated more often. So I want to devote several important points as to why these people (myself included) are so damn lovable.
One day, you’re wearing leggings and a long sweater. The next, a cute jacket paired with skinny jeans. And so on, so forth. With clothes, the fashion you wear changes on a day-to-day basis. The trends come and go in the blink of an eye. From Snapbacks to dad hats, nothing is really permanent in the fashion industry. But with piercings, those are a way to express yourself in a way that doesn’t change. Or at least, it will change only if and when you choose to change it. Piercings are not as permanent as tattoos, but not as fickle as clothing trends. When you pick out an industrial as your next piercing, that is what you will have nestled in your ear for an undetermined length of time. And that is awesome.
Have you ever gotten your ears pierced? It’s a little bit like having a stapler rammed into your ear real quick (yeah, unfortunately I got my first ear piercings done with a gun back in the day). Your earlobes are red for a bit and you have to keep in the earrings for a while until the holes stop oozing yellow gunk. Seven-year-old me was not having fun at all. But once they healed up, I was ecstatic because I suddenly had the ability to wear many different kinds of jewelry. The kind of jewelry I had never gotten to wear before! As an adult, I’ve gotten a lot more places pierced which have been a lot more painful. My most recent piercing, the tragus, took forever to heal up. It got infected and kept me from wearing earphones for months. But the end result was me having an adorable, tiny piercing. And did you know that tragus clickers are a thing now? What a time to be alive! Pierced people fight through the temporary discomfort because they know they’re soon going to have a perfectly healed up, gorgeous-looking piercing for friends and strangers to admire and check out for years to come.
It takes balls to go “Yup, I’m gonna insert that rod of metal in my stomach” and go through with it. Because the end result is a dope belly button ring. Many people can’t imagine themselves getting pierced at all. But hey, it’s not for everyone. Facial and body piercings are art. The kind of art you always get to take with you wherever you go. Some may compose music or paint masterpieces, and pierced people might do those things as well. But in addition to the art they may create with their hands, they allow other people to work with their hands to place small, beautiful metal objects throughout their body. Our flesh houses are going to be with us for quite some time. At least, until we can create perfect, synthetic clones which we can then transfer our consciousnesses into. But until then, I think that putting bits of metal here and there is a brilliant idea.
I’ve seen people comment online (or say to my face) that piercings are just “too much”… That they’re ruining a pretty face. That they might make people avoid us. Well, I can’t speak for the rest of the piercing community, but I wouldn’t mind being avoided! But not everyone is as introverted and asocial as I am. There are plenty of bubbly, amiable, kind, generous people who have piercings all up in their faces. Just because some people enjoy getting piercings, does not mean they are unapproachable, mean, or distant. I promise you, we are just regular ole people. Nothing intimidating about us. Once you look past the piercings and see us as normal, everyday people, I promise that we’ll get along famously.
Oh, you don’t like my septum because you think it makes me look like a cow? You want to pull it? I’ve literally had “friends” who would repeatedly tell me these sorts of things, purposefully trying to get on my nerves. Troll me all you want, I’m not getting rid of any of my piercings. I can put up with a lot of nonsense. Because the amount of genuine compliments always balances out the negative ones. Cashiers staring longingly at my piercings before telling me how cool they look. Shopkeepers vocally approving the jewelry in my ears. I love when people love the metal I’ve chosen to adorn my body with, and I’m indifferent to all the others’ negativity. We are unshakable. And if that isn’t something to appreciate about a person, I don’t know what is!
What do you love most about your friends’ piercings? What is your favorite thing about your own piercings?
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