Cleaning Vs Healing

For years a common turn of phrase around my piercing room has been “I’d rather get a piercing and heal a tattoo.” And it’s true! Piercings take about a second and are so easy to get done. Especially given that most of my tattoo sessions are marathon sessions that go for hours, a piercing that's finished in just a few seconds is ideal. But, piercings are much more work to heal. Sometimes taking months or even an entire year to heal, the process has its ups and downs, complete with bumps, swelling, etc. Tattoos heal in a week or two and then feel fine. And I’ve talked at length about the process of healing piercings- how they heal, how specific piercings heal, and aftercare concepts in general. But there's one thing I think many folks get wrong when it comes to piercing healing, and it causes issues for countless clients. That is the difference between cleaning your piercing and healing your piercing.

Cleaning- the process of removing crust, secretions, waste material, food, or other debris from around your piercing. As a piercing heals, the body produces natural secretions as a byproduct of the wound-healing process. These can sometimes be a small amount of liquid secretion or can dry up around the jewelry as little ‘crusties.’ Though a normal part of the healing process, we still want to remove this waste. For piercings in and around the mouth, we may also get food or drink around our piercings. Makeup, skincare, etc. should all be avoided around piercings as best as possible, but occasionally may get on the area. All of these things should be cleaned away from the piercing during the healing process.

Healing- the process of repairing damaged tissue through a series of biochemical events. This includes hemostasis or the clotting of blood to prevent further blood loss. Inflammation, which assists in the process of clearing microbes and debris from the wound. Epithelialization, the regeneration of new tissue and skin along the inside of the wound. Fibroplasia, the production of collagen to strengthen the tissue. And Maturation, the final strengthening of the new tissue in the wound via collagen cross-linking and wound remodeling. These are all the things happening at a biological and chemical level in your skin at the site of a wound as your body heals it. These processes take months and months to fully occur, and it's something your body simply does inherently.

And cleaning is not at all the same as healing. This is an important distinction because very often folks confuse the two. We believe that when we spray saline on our piercings, we are healing them. And when we pick off those annoying but oh so satisfying to remove crusties, we are healing them. But we aren’t. There isn’t anything we can really do that will heal our piercings. Our bodies are what is healing our piercings. Not saline, not salt water, not whatever chemical or paste the internet told you to put on it. Nope. Your body, your white and red blood cells, your collagen, and your skin, slowly and steadily working to knit you back together after we’ve added a little more sparkle to ya.

Now what we can do is create an environment that makes it easier for our bodies to heal in. This is where cleaning is so important. If we let the natural secretion build-up, it can cause issues for our piercings. From irritating the wound and making us itch to getting so built up it traps moisture and causes an almost diaper rash-like irritation to occur. We can also be gentle with our piercings- we understand that the healing process is many stages that occur over a great length of time- and to help our bodies with that we can try our best not to catch, snag, or sleep on our piercings. We want things to heal well- so we don’t put any products on our piercings that can prolong healing or damage the fragile new skin that our body is building. Things like hydrogen peroxide, aspirin paste, and tea tree oil can all be extremely damaging to the new tissues. We can nourish our bodies- get enough sleep, eat nutritionally dense foods, and reduce stress. All things that support our immune system, so it can better work on healing the injuries we have. Cleaning helps as part of this- but it can also hurt. Cleaning 6 times a day and banging around the jewelry is doing more harm then good. Cleaning with harsh chemicals that irritate the skin does more harm then good. And picking at our piercings under the guise of cleaning also does more harm then good.

When we assume that cleaning and healing are the same thing, it's easy to have an issue with a piercing and just start cleaning it more, messing with it, or picking it and thinking that this is helping it heal. If we just spray that saline a few more times a day, maybe everything will settle down. But when we understand that cleaning and healing are different and that just spraying saline on our ear more doesn’t really affect those underlying processes, we can approach how we work with our piercings better. We can view piercings more holistically and consider our lifestyles, health, travel, and physical activity all as factors in this healing process. Cleaning and healing are two different, but important parts of the process when being pierced.

Happy Healing! <3