I’ve spent a bit over a year now avoiding any body modification interests other than a little tattooing because my interest in body modification had become a potential liability in court and was being used to help paint me as ‘unstable’ (not a fun thing to have to defend to decrepit old judges!), but now that that’s over, I figured it was time to celebrate. One of my very first piercings — and one of my favorites — was my hand web piercing, and I’ve been missing it… So I decided to do that again!
It was all DIY of course, and I used a 10ga needle and a 7/16″ 12ga ring (which increased the initial bleeding, but made the follow-through and bead placement much easier). The placement was done carefully to both minimize movement of the tissue trapped by the piercing (there’s no shifting of skin between the points), and to minimize movement of the jewelry. The ring lies flush against the skin (rather than dangling centrally), and what little movement there is can be absorbed more easily by a ring than by a bar in my opinion. So yeah. New piercing, DIY, good placement, safe.
But I also wanted to mention something frightening. I was talking to a friend that left the industry earlier this year. Because they no longer need to use their autoclave, they stopped sending in their spore tests. The scary thing is, for four months — continuing until today — they’ve received a letter from the spore testing laboratory (a big name place with a good reputation used by hundreds of studios if not more) saying that their test came back successfully and that their clave is functioning properly. Even though they didn’t send anything in. Scary stuff. I wonder if this is a small clerical error, or if it’s large-scale fraud — gambling with people’s lives — by the company. I suspect the latter.
So that’s one of the many reasons I prefer DIY. How does this person know that their clave didn’t fail a year ago??? It’s certainly possible that a clave in this situation could a blood-borne pathogen, and, with the right sort of bad luck, thousands of people could have been infected with Hepatitis C… Statistically, if they’re doing this on a large scale, it’s surely happened already at some tattoo or piercing studio, hospital, or dental office.
