Have you ever taken a really good long time to make sure your navel is clean? I mean in the shower, after what happened at work not to long ago, I make it a point to lather rinse repeat. My entire way of showering was put under a microscope, and it made me realize that you can truly underestimate exactly what clean is, and when you think you're clean and you're not well... read on.
At A Glance Author GeekyGrrlie Contact GeekyGrrlie@bme.anon Artist Jimmy Vick Studio The Zen Factory Location Blytheville, AR My name is Nicole. I am working as a piercing apprentice to Jimmy Vick at the Zen Factory in Blytheville, AR. At the moment I am doing the easier piercings (lip, eyebrow, ears and cartilage), but at the time my basic duties were the piercing setup, holding the forceps, and cleaning up after a piercing. And the piercing market is really small around here until people open up a little and for now I am the only person in town with more than 3 piercings* (and no I don't count gunned ears). So navels and tongues are really the mainstay of the piercing we do.
So about two hours before closing this gang of like, 7 girls come in, all wanting their navels done. (Cheerleaders- eek!) No biggie. We successfully pierce the first three with no problems. One basic CBR 14g, one basic CBB 14g, and a CBB with a little pink jewel thingy, 14g. Then number four comes into the piercing room. (CBR 14g ) She has one of those really great navels, super flat tummy with the skin flap that is so easy to pierce. You can see where she had been pierced before, but the scar tissue is pretty much like non existant. Just a small dot on her flap. This is her fifth navel piercing she tells us. She can't figure out why it always gets so infected, but it got so bad once she had to go to a doctor to get antibiotics for it. Scary. And of course, the time she pierced it herself with a safety pin it got infected, but I did that, (when i was 13) and mine did too, right before i ripped it out on a pair of baggy jeans. So we set up, and begin the basic cleaning. Green soap first, iodine on cotton balls (three times) and then a little alcohol. Mark her with the sterile marker, lay her on the chair and raise her up.
Next to the mark we made is a small fleck of what looks like dry skin. So I run for the q-tips and get it off. Forceps on, lined the mark up to the middle. Lift it up to look underneath, and then we see it. *SHRIEK* It is what appears to be a large accumulation of "I never EVER clean inside my navel". And her navel was very deceptive. For a skinny little girl, she had a it was DEEP. Few things gross me out, (cat puke, roadkill, tripe, Britney Spears) but this was definitely a new addition to that list. We had to take off the forceps and reclean her. It took both ends of 5 q-tips to get all the funky goo out, which looked like a mixture of peanut butter and ear wax. Very nasty stuff. And it was like, way way up inside her navel.
It was a very delicate thing to tell her that her personal hygiene was the reason her navel kept getting infected, but we managed to do so without embarrassing her too badly but still drawing attention to the fact that she needs to be more careful. And of course, we didn't say anything to the rest of the girls who were with her. But since I don't have to be delicate on the internet, here goes.
CLEAN OUT YOUR BELLYBUTTONS PEOPLE! DON'T GO TO GET PIERCED WITH A NAVEL FULL OF FUNK!
Lather rinse repeat, like I said. And always dry it out well. Bad hygiene makes good piercings go bad. And it makes your friendly neighborhood piercer awfully uncomfortable.
*14g Labret, 14g Lip, 6g tongue and three 14g tongue (four total) 18g nostril, 14g bridge, 14g nipples, 6g ears, and a 18g cartilage hoop. A work in progress, but now that i get pierced for free it's going much faster. By the end of the year i will have 3 more 14g lip (2 on each side) a 12g madison, a 14g BB on my nape, a 14g medusa, and i am on a big diet and workout kick, so i might just have the tummy soon for an industrial naval project. Also, anyone with a vertical bridge, please email me and tell me about the process, namely was it terrible hard to do? i doon't really have much skin to pinch on my forehead, and i wonder if that makes it hard. Hooray for BME, feeding my addiction!