Room for Mistakes in Piercing Spaces

Making mistakes. We’ve talked about it before here on the blog, and discussed the fact that piercers are only human. We do sometimes make mistakes. Perhaps we lose the transfer on a piece of jewelry, and the angle comes out less than perfect. If you are like me, perhaps you use the strength too often and break the threads off a threaded cluster. Whatever the case, we make mistakes sometimes. The mark of a truly great piercer, in my opinion, is not never making mistakes, but rather how they handle them. Fixing things, being honest with clients, and being ethical in how we navigate things when something goes wrong. Knowing this, however, has led me to a larger question. How do we, as in industry, leave room for mistakes? Specifically, how do we handle mistakes online?

For many piercers, online forums and resources are the primary source of continuing education. They may not have access to piercers in person who can help them learn, and they may even live in a country with literally no one else to talk to about refining skills. They may not have the finances to travel to expensive cities for expensive conferences, even with scholarship assistance. So, discussing things online with peers is one of the primary ways they learn and grow.

This has its pros and cons. In the past, many piercing online spaces have been brutal. Post something that is a single hair off from perfect, and you’d have piercers jumping down your throat to tell you to hang up your needles, quit piercing, people may even message you to tell you you suck, and your work sucks. It’s gotten better in recent years, but still not perfect. There appears to be a baseline assumption of ill intent that prevails in these spaces. We see someone post something that is off in some way, and we assume they don’t care about the client or about piercing or about the work they do. Which is to say, if someone is taking the time to post their work in a forum, I think we can assume, as a baseline, that they care. But we seem to love to assume negative intent.

This is something I am personally guilty of: seeing someone post something incorrect or unsafe, and immediately jumping to assume that person doesn’t care and needs to be told, in no uncertain terms, how incorrect the work is. And it took me longer than I’d care to admit to realize the double standard I held people to. If a friend and someone I knew personally messaged me asking for feedback, I’d tell them what was wrong but assure them it’s a fixable mistake, and that they will learn and grow from it. Someone anonymous on the internet? I was much quicker to be harsh in my responses. And I think a lot of this mentality comes from seeing many people who truly don’t care. I did my apprenticeship in a town that had a studio famous for 10$ piercings. I spent years and years helping clients with painful, scarred-up, incorrect piercings from piercers who bragged about doing 150 piercings in a day, and only needing to spend 3 minutes with a client for a nostril piercing. They didn’t even talk about aftercare most of the time. So for many of us, we see the result of these casual attitudes towards piercings: we see the clients who are in our piercing rooms, in pain, crying, upset, and we see the real human cost of it when piercings go wrong. So we take that into our interactions online. We are defensive in how we reply because we feel like we are protecting a client, looking out for the safety of those around us. And the intention here is a good one, a great one even. We want to keep people safe, and we want to make sure clients' bodies are cared for well. But the execution is often one that enforces a system of perfectionism in the industry that just isn’t possible or realistic. It makes piercers feel like they have to be perfect every single time or they are a bad piercer. And it makes us scared to ask for help when things go wrong- so we never learn the skills we need to handle a mistake correctly.

If someone posts a nostril and the placement is a little low or a little far back, does that warrant being told to quit the whole industry? Why not take the time to explain the pros and cons of different placements, and show them example marks. Maybe connect them to someone you know in the area who could help them. If someone posts a septum that comes out a little crooked, do we crucify them? If someone tries to tell me they have never had a septum come out off, I know they are lying. Everyone does, so why do we punish strangers so harshly for something we well know happens to us all. Hell, I have a whole speech when I pierce a deviated septum, letting clients know if the first attempt isn’t perfect, I’ll want to make some changes. Because I know too well how tricky these can be. Focusing on critique and feedback with compassion and kindness goes a long way.

I know for myself, I have worked very hard over the years to stop projecting my experiences with shitty chop shop piercers onto online interactions. I’ve tried to stop assuming folks posting or sharing work don’t care, and I’ve tried to focus on using language for feedback that is more encouraging and kinder, alongside honesty. I try to answer folks' questions like I would a friend or a peer, rather than a stranger. And it feels like the entire industry is trying to make that shift. In just my almost 14 years of piercing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen our online spaces be healthier, kinder, or safer. Years ago, it was borderline abusive the way we spoke to each other online. Now, it’s leaps and bounds better, and it makes me genuinely proud to see this shift.

However, sometimes I do wonder if we have headed so far in that direction, out of an attempt to resist the cruelty of early spaces, that we are doing clients a disservice. I think of a specific interaction that has stuck with me for a long time. I had a client come in who had 3-week-old nipple piercings and was complaining of soreness and pain in her breast. I took her back and saw what seemed like textbook signs of mastitis, an infection in the breast tissue. She had been pierced with excessively long bars, fairly deep, and the movement was constantly causing irritation. The client also had breast implants and said the piercer hadn’t said a single thing about that. The piercing process had been curious; the client was told to sit up and lean forward, and her nipples were pierced with her breasts dangling down. Alarm bells began to ring in my mind. That body positioning would cause the implants to shift forward and down with gravity. Could this piercing have nicked the internal capsule around the implants? The pain and redness she complained of increased my concern. We referred her to a doctor immediately. Later, she returned for a follow-up. While in the studio, she got a call. Her surgeon had gotten the test results from her doctor's visit sent over. The outcome was not good- she was going to lose an implant. I held her as she sobbed in our lobby. She had saved up for years and years for these implants; they were a huge part of her self-confidence and her body image. Now they were ruined. And she was looking at a long, expensive journey to even attempt to fix them. I was too hurt for her to speak.

My coworker, more level-headed, reached out to the piercer who did the work. Explained the situation that we saw. Let them know the client and possibly her lawyers would be in contact. She explained what had happened and why, and encouraged the piercer to learn more before offering nipple piercings to clients, particularly those with breast implants. She even offered for the piercer to come shadow at our studio, to learn better techniques. The piercer refused. Years later, in an online space, the same piercer accused my coworker of bullying. Said that interaction was so mean it made them afraid of the piercing community.

A client lost one of her breasts, had to have emergency surgery to remove her implant, insert an elevator, wait for the skin to heal and infection to clear, elevate the remaining tissue, and then have a second surgery to have the implant put back in. She went through days and weeks of pain, of time off work, of recovering, of having additional scarring on her breasts. And my coworker, who offered that piercer the chance to come and shadow and learn what went wrong, was the mean person. For contacting this piercer and telling them, bluntly but honestly, that a client was severely injured by their lack of education.

Sometimes, a mistake is a slightly crooked septum, and I don’t think we should treat that as something we shame someone out of the industry for. But sometimes the mistake causes serious, serious harm. Sometimes a mistake causes severe permanent scarring, severe infection, or even the loss of a breast. In those instances, we have to prioritize the client's safety. If someone comes online and posts that they can’t use an autoclave correctly, they don’t know how, and they are piercing with non-sterile equipment, potentially exposing clients to bloodborne pathogens, we need to tell that person this, and in no unclear terms, make sure they correct this swiftly, before it becomes a public health crisis in their area. If the mistake someone has made could cause serious bodily harm, it needs to be addressed. And increasingly, these kinds of mistakes are getting posted, people are addressing the harm, and others are still saying “you need to be nicer. Think of the piercer's feelings. Let’s all be kinder.”

The answer isn’t found in scathing critiques that make people feel like quitting the industry.  But the answer also isn’t found in holding someone's hand and coddling them after they’ve caused a client serious harm. We, as piercers, have to be able to take criticism. Our clients' bodies must come before our egos. If we do something incorrectly enough that it causes harm, we need to be able to hear that and change and grow to prevent the issue from occurring again. We also need to remember that our peers are not our enemies, and that someone posting online or in forums is probably someone who cares and wants to do better. And we should approach those interactions with kindness in equal parts to honesty. But we also have to be able to separate critique from bullying, and we have to be able to hear when we do something unsafe. I think the industry is better about this than it was before, but I do think it’s still imperfect. And I’m not writing this because I think I have the answer- I’m writing it because I know I don’t. But I want to start a larger, community conversation surrounding how we break the habits of assuming negative intention of other piercers, how we find compassion for our peers, as we simultaneously remain open to critique and feedback, and see the benefit of being told when we are wrong.