Wednesday I have a meeting with an importer here to see their new piercing guns for the review article on them… Outside of the small-gauge kits you all know, they're showing me “what's coming up”, including systems that can pierce navels and other bits with normal barbells and rings, as well as stretching guns and devices designed to hit 95% of the bread-and-butter of piercing studios. Automated devices like this are getting better and better, and as they increasingly penetrate the market over the next three years, piercing studios risk seeing their market evaporate.
If piercings are performed for a few dollars in salons and mall kiosks, and can be shown to be comprably safe as well as offering a similar range of options and jewelry, how many piercing studios will survive? Will piercing again become just another footnote to tattooing? Will this type of mainstreaming kill piercing, or will it split it into two branches — “true believers” and “fashion vicitims”? Or is this just part of a normal 20-year trend cycle, and piercing will be back to “1994-normal” by 2014? Should piercing studios start using guns if it makes them economically competitive?
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