The Piercing Police | Thoughts on Piercer Forums and Community

A piercer uploads a photo of a nostril piercing they did to a forum, asking if they can have help sourcing a matching end, as their client wanted a pair, but they only have one in stock. The first comment reads, “Can’t help with the end, but honestly, it shouldn’t matter. That placement is wack, why would you ever place it there?” The second comment says, “I can’t help but notice you have this poster on your wall. Is it properly framed? If it’s not properly framed, that could be a health hazard. Can you post a clearer photo?” The third comment, responding to the second, reads “I looked up their studio on Google, and scrolled back on their instagram, and checked out the interior photos, and I don’t think this is framed or hung correctly to standard. AND there's a piercing with shitty jewelry from 2015. Gross!”

For a community of people covered in ACAB tattoos and proudly wearing defund the police merch, we sure do love policing in our communities. From Community Activist and Speaker Niké Aurea, “Unintentionally Policing others in your community spaces is a regular issue. Policing often looks like correcting tone, over-explaining, or stepping in to control how someone expresses their emotion. Policing others can come from fear. It can be fear of conflict, of losing control, or fear of things being perceived a certain way. But policing has no place in community culture. It limits growth, silences nuance, and creates an environment where people feel surveilled instead of supported. When we police, we usually aren’t protecting the community; we‘re protecting our own sense of safety, control, or image. That instinct might come from past harm, people-pleasing, or a belief that keeping things ‘calm’ or having control over others' behaviors is the same as keeping them safe. Ask yourself: What am I actually trying to protect right now? Is it the space’s safety, or my own comfort? Start by listening longer, asking open questions, and checking your assumptions before trying to fix or correct. Real safety in community spaces doesn’t come from being able to control others or a situation; it comes from trust, communication, and shared responsibility.”

The piercer who originally just wanted help finding jewelry instead found themselves attacked, down to random piercers in their community looking up their shop online and scrolling back months on their social media to find indoor photos of their studio to……berate them for hanging a poster the wrong way. Is this community?

If the first commenter had asked, “I don’t usually place my nostrils here, can I ask about the placement? Wish I could help with the jewelry, but I don’t carry that brand!” Maybe the original poster could have shared that this client had a mole removed from their nose a few years ago, and out of an abundance of caution, you both decided to place the piercing to avoid the scar. If the second and third commenters had asked kindly about the poster, perhaps the OP could have explained that it was a gift from a dear client they wanted to put up as soon as possible, and they had a new frame on order. And yeah, we could debate that it shouldn’t have been hung till the correct, wipeable frame was ready. But maybe the gift was from a client who recently passed, and having it hung up lifted enough weight from the whole studio's shoulders that maybe it’s ok to wait 3 days for a proper glass frame to be delivered. Maybe this was sentimental, special. Maybe it really was just a misunderstanding in what can and can’t be hung on the walls. We’ll never know. Rather than meet someone's post with investigation and accusation, we could meet it with curiosity and compassion. We could try assuming good intentions when we see our peers post and share something, and the same when someone comments with a critique or negative feedback.

But it’s hard to assume good intentions when someone has trawled through 6 years of social media posts to share one shitty piercing or bad photo someone posted and use that to accuse them of being somehow ‘lesser’ as a piercer, as though the person who just spent 10 minutes internet creeping on a stranger has the moral high ground.

It’s hard because there's just no good intention in “owning” someone like that.

I should know, I used to do it.

A lot.

I came up in this industry during a time when it was all ‘tough love’. The forums were a scathing colosseum where every comment you made, every piercing you posted, was a reason to get ripped apart. The coolest, most popular piercers would be spared from these cutting remarks, but everyone else was in the Thunderdome. I was around long enough to see a lot of pushback about how unhealthy and downright cruel these spaces were, and the creation of newer, healthier online spaces for piercing.

And, the rise of the piercing police. Now, instead of outright comments to ‘hang up your needles’, it was well-written, well-articulated take-downs. As long as you padded your comment with enough technical points, you could be as vicious to someone else as you wanted in the name of safety.

Of course, as Niké mentioned, this all comes from a place of fear. For many piercers, part of this fear is deeply personal. We often see clients come in all the time who are hurt or traumatized from unsafe piercings. We pull 16g 7/16 curves out of swollen, irritated tragus piercings and comfort clients as they sob about the huge scar that will be left by their improperly done navel. We see the real pain and suffering caused by these dangerous practices, and we want to call that out when we do, because we are scared and our hearts hurt for the clients who will be wounded.

But if I’m being honest, that’s maybe……5-10% of what's posted in these forums? Generally, if a piercer has made it to a learning forum, they care about being a safe piercer. And if they don’t, they don’t last long in these spaces. Most of the time, what's posted is something that’s maybe off in placement or angle, outdated in jewelry choice, or just not current with modern safe practices. But we treat it like it’s no different than shoving a rusty nail in someone's ear and calling it a day.

Part of that is real fear for clients….and part of that is when we are pointing the finger at someone else, no one is pointing it at us. That’s where I was when I started growing the confidence to post in these forums (actually, it started with my second mentor requiring me to post in those forums. Both posting my own work and critiquing others. In fact, one of my monthly assignments at a studio I trained at was to critique at least two other piercers in these forums. The harsher- the better.) A younger version of me was so exhausted at seeing clients in the studio with shitty piercings and bad jewelry, and I told myself that those other piercers at those shitty shops must just not care at all, and how could they do this to people! (Spoiler alert- most of those other piercers do care, and don’t know better, or are stuck in a shitty situation. You know….like I was at my first studio using externally threaded jewelry.) It took me maybe 6 months of working in an APP member studio to feel like I was better than them.

Forget the fact that my first year and some change in this industry was spent doing a shoddy 3-month apprenticeship and then figuring it out on my own. Forget the fact that my first studio insisted the APP was bullshit, and their standards were all just money grabs, and the stuff we used was fine. I met a well-known piercer in the area who, to put it kindly, eviscerated me. Told me the jewelry I used was shit, my work was shit, I wasn’t properly trained, and if I really cared about piercing, I would hang up my needles, humble myself, and get a new apprenticeship. That I didn’t deserve to be a piercer unless I did this. I cried the entire drive home, and also quit my job the next day.

I was 19, and lived with my parents at the time. I could afford to leave that job without wondering how I would have a roof over my head or food on the table. I had a level of privilege that most in this industry don’t, relying on this job to pay their bills. I used to wear it like a badge of pride- I found out I was doing things wrong, and I quit on the spot and pursued better things. So why couldn’t everyone else?

In hindsight, I realize how wrong that train of thought is. I’m still grateful to this piercer for calling me out- because he wasn’t wrong. My work was bad, I was hurting the people who were trusting me with their bodies- and that’s not acceptable. Most of us in this industry are passionate about what we do, we love piercings! And many had the same start I did- getting an apprenticeship at a shop that we believed was a good, safe place to learn. In hindsight, it was partially my fault I was doing bad work, but it was also the fault of my mentor. This was someone who had pierced me since I was 14, someone I trusted. When they told me externally threaded jewelry was safe, I believed them. When they said the APP was a scam, I had my doubts, but didn’t question them. I eventually did enough research to start to see through their lies, but it took me a year to figure that out.

Most apprentices trust the people teaching them. We believe they are guiding us in the correct direction. These days, I personally find more fault with the mentor for misleading than the student for being taught wrong. It’s not an apprentice's job to know all this already; it’s literally their job to learn. Despite this, we often take the full weight of our anger and concern out on the apprentice or junior piercer. We meet their lack of education not with compassion or grace, but blame, shame, and attack. Even those who aren’t in the same privileged position I was in to be able to just quit their job. As soon as I realized what I was doing was wrong, I left, and I taught myself a lot more. And then, I took that knowledge online.

What mattered online was that I knew better, and I wasn’t scared to point this out. I never once asked myself if this piercer might be in a similarly isolating situation where they truly didn’t know better. I never once blamed the mentor for teaching this person bad piercing habits or unsafe practices. No- it was easier to blame the apprentice or piercer. I couldn’t go yell at the piercer up the street from me about putting 22g seam rings in fresh nostrils, but I could yell at the random piercer on the internet who posted a slightly crooked nostril in a forum about how that piercing should have been done differently. And I’ll be honest, after writing up a scathing 7-paragraph breakdown of everything that person did wrong, including scrolling 6 years back in their Instagram to point out every bad angle or weird setup they posted, I did feel better. I felt a sense of righteousness; I felt vindicated for the clients I saw all day with bad piercings.

What I did not feel was community. I did not feel compassion. I did not feel grace.

And when I would get ready to post in these forums, I would be a mess of anxiety. I had to watch every video back 23 times to ensure there wasn’t anything that would get me reamed the same way. I checked every photo and every caption a dozen times- was there a spot of gentian where someone could call me out on it? Did one angle make it look like my glove brushed the edge of my tray? There was a paranoia about posting- I knew my work would be looked at under a magnifying glass, and if found wanting, the public shame would come. More than once, I asked myself….is this really a community that feels good to be a part of?

It didn’t. And yet, that didn’t stop the harsh comments from coming, veiled as “blunt honesty”. It took years of therapy, years of unlearning my own trauma in my introduction to the industry, and years of learning what a healthy community looks like to admit that.

Now I sit here, watching the same community policing happen through the younger generations of piercers and apprentices. I wonder how many will make the same mistakes I have made, cause the same harm I have both experienced and caused. And I wonder when we will break the cycle. We have a lot stacked against us, growing up in a carceral society where we connect through gossip, cliquishness, and pettiness, which is fun at first but can become just as harmful later on. For many of us, our experiences start in school, and then as we start in this industry, they shape the way we have these interactions. We punish others, we are scathing, and we find joy in it.  Often, it takes a lot of individual work to heal from that and approach these interactions differently. We are often scared, overwhelmed, and burned out from our jobs, the world we live in, and the stress of daily life. We see clients daily with botched, bad piercings; we comfort them, and we lament what caused this to happen. It makes us want to point the finger, to cast blame on the piercers who cause this harm. We want to protect our clients from this harm. “Online, we perform solidarity for strangers rather than engaging in hard conversations with comrades.” Says adrienne maree brown, Author of We Will Not Cancel Us. She goes on to say, “Knee-jerk callouts say: those who cause harm or mess up or do not agree with us cannot change and cannot belong. They must be eradicated. The bad things in the world cannot change; we must eliminate the bad till only to good is left.”

But in our community, we know they can change. We have dozens and perhaps even hundreds of piercers who are success stories, who started in shitty situations and doing bad piercings and learned and grew and became better. Some of the best piercers in the world started with externally threaded jewelry and bad angles. Part of what got them there was the scathing critique. But that also has caused deep rifts and hurt within our community; it’s pushed people away.

I dream of a world not where every piercer is perfect, because that's not reality. But of a world where we can correct mistakes with compassion as well as honesty. Where we can be a part of messy, difficult, complex community conversations. Where we can hold the contradiction that someone has done questionable work, and also is in a bad situation, and this is the best they can do right now. I envision a world where we can break this cycle.

12 ish years ago, I sat in a living room with Eduardo Chavarria, complaining about the shitty piercer up the street from my shop at the time, and how could they hurt people like this, and how could they not care. And he turned to me and said, “One day in ten years' time, you won’t care about any of this. You’ll just care about doing good piercings, and what someone else does or doesn’t do won’t matter to you. In fact, you’ll probably be more interested in helping that piercer than shaming them.” At the time, I insisted I would never stop caring about bad work, and that people who hurt clients like that deserve the shame. Well, it’s been more than 10 years since that conversation, and those words, and the wisdom within them, couldn’t be more true. I am not particularly bothered by the work from others in my area, and I’m more interested in sharing education and advice these days than I am in shaming someone for doing a bad piercing. Every single piercer alive and piercing today has done bad piercings. We learn from them, and we get better. And I think every piercer should be given that same opportunity to grow.

I don’t write this to pretend I’m some paragon of perfection who never sees a really bad piercing online and goes “what the actual fuck.” I do. Often. (Usually on reddit.) I’m not writing this to give myself an out for years of participating in our often toxic online culture in piercing and absolve myself from the scathing critiques I’ve handed down, nor am I writing this to point fingers at the people who handed me the same harsh words. I write this to share what I have learned from my own lived experiences and my own personal journey. I’m probably still making mistakes even in writing this, even as I am doing the best I can in this present moment. I will not be perfect, but I will keep learning. I will not be perfect, but I will also not keep silent- I will keep learning.

To all those out there learning and growing with me, to all the piercers who have shared their wisdom with me over the years, and to all those putting in the work to make this industry a safer, kinder space. Thank you.

My inbox is always open for piercers who want to talk shop, ask for advice, or get critique, these days with a side of kindness, not cruelty.

Special thanks for Alexander and Eduardo for inpsiring this, and helping me put this piece together.