What If. How to Handle Unusual Piercing Situations

In wandering the depths of the internet, a few posts have been making the rounds depicting some rather unusual piercing issues. They may have left people wondering what they would do in such a situation. So today we’re going to talk about exactly that – what you should do if one of these issues happens to you!

• You’ve got an enormous swelling under your piercing – It’s not an irritation bump and it’s certainly not a keloid. It’s a giant lump in your skin and it shouldn’t be there. What to do? This is a situation that requires medical attention. You cannot simply remove the jewelry and let it heal. That can allow a possible infection to remain in the body with no way to drain. If this happens, see your doctor ASAP.

• You’ve got an extra hole in your piercing – If you can see the jewelry through your skin, your piercing is sadly rejecting. You should take it out. The longer you let it go, the worse the scarring will be when it fully rejects.

• You’ve got an irritation bump – Some things you should definitely NOT do are apply aspirin or tea tree oil. You need to find out the cause of the bump. Is the angle of your piercing wrong? Was it done with inappropriate jewelry? Did it get snagged on something? If you can figure out the problem and correct it, you should be able to get rid of the bump. If the piercing wasn’t done correctly, you can take it out and get it re-done and minimize the potential scarring by catching it early. You can change the jewelry to something more appropriate or simply baby a piercing that got caught on something.

• Your piercing is bleeding. A lot. And won’t stop. – This is a very rare occurrence but if it should happen to happen, it requires medical attention. Like the “Stop reading this article and go get seen immediately” kind of medical attention. Don’t worry, we’ll still be here when you get home!

• What is this weird red ring of tissue around my stretched lobe? – That’s a blowout. Simply put, the fistula has turned inside out. This can happen due to stretching too fast, stretching with inappropriate tools, or sleeping with your plugs in. You need to remove your jewelry and let it heal on its own. You MAY be able to replace the jewelry with smaller diameter glass single-flare plugs as things start to heal but the fistula needs to rest and heal up. You will probably lose some size while your ear heals, but you can always re-stretch when everything is healthy again.

• You just got pierced and you’ve got a black eye – This is totally normal. Piercing causes bleeding, especially in the eye area. Piercings like eyebrow and bridge piercings are especially likely to leave you with a shiner for a week or two, but it will go away on its own.

Most piercings are a happy experience and can be healed without much trouble. Sometimes, though, weird stuff happens. Not all of that weird stuff is necessarily bad or even abnormal and much of it can fixed with a quick trip to the piercer or some extra home care. If you can tell the difference between normal-weird and emergency-weird, you’re already prepared to handle the emergencies if they should ever happen to you. Happy piercing!