Piercing Kits: Not Even Once

You might be wondering if it’s worth the money to go see a piercer and get your new body piercing done by a professional. There’s plenty of movies that show cool-kid stars giving themselves piercings, so why can’t anyone do it? After all, the latest teen dramas make it look like all you need is a sterilized needle and a high tolerance for pain to do piercings yourself. So why not use a piercing kit rather than make an appointment at your local parlor?

For those of you wondering, it takes piercers a long time to get qualified to do their job. Piercers have to train for a minimum of three months, and then do a residency (like doctors!) to get qualified to practice on their own. That’s right, a piercer has to be supervised in a residency for six months to a year in order to be certified to set up a shop doing body piercing for money. So with all that in mind, what makes you think that just picking up a piercing kit would make you that qualified?

It’s very dangerous to do a body piercing on yourself because there are all kinds of things that can go wrong when you try to, you know, stick white-hot metal into yourself. It’s much better to let a professional do that kind of thing, for a whole myriad of reasons. Anyone who’s considering buying a piercing kit should check out this fun guide to why you shouldn’t. You’ll learn a lot, and hopefully, you won’t end up in a sticky situation from ill-judged body piercing choices.

Read on to hear all the potential drawbacks to using a piercing kit rather than a trained specialist!

You might do it wrong

If you get a piercing kit, you might notice that it comes with some instructions so that you can be safer about the body piercing you’re about to give yourself. At the very least, you can probably find instructions on the internet to give you a basic idea of how piercings work and how you should perform one on yourself. However, these instructions are like a Wikipedia page–who knows where that information comes from?

When you follow the instructions from a piercing kit, there are a few things that can go wrong. For one thing, like we said before, the instructions might be incorrect, resulting in a very faulty body piercing. You might even notice that you aren’t able to interpret the instructions very well–it’s easy to misunderstand abstract looking diagrams, and there might be instructions that you just can’t figure out. That’s doubled when you’re working with a more difficult piercing like a horseshoe or labret. 

For another thing, you might notice that reading the instructions and actually performing them on yourself are quite another. There are tons of things that can go wrong when you follow steps that you haven’t been trained to do! We can’t emphasize enough; body piercing specialists go to school for their craft for over a year before they set up shop. Even when you have instructions and you know the instructions are correct, that doesn’t mean you have the expertise to give yourself the quality of body piercing you want. 

All in all, the results of following the instructions in a piercing kit are probably going to be much lower quality than the results if you get your new body piercing from someone who knows what they’re doing. You might like the idea of giving yourself your own body piercing, but consider that if your new piercing doesn’t look good, you could have that faulty piercing forever! The only piercings you want to have forever are the ones that actually look good: meaning the ones that are done by experts.

You won’t get the aftercare you need

You might have a piercing kit to tell you how to do the actual piercing, but does that mean you have the expertise that a piercing specialist can give you in the form of advice and reassurance? You’ll probably have tons of questions in the first day or two after you get your body piercing, and if you’re asking the limited instructions on your piercing kit you might be pretty severely disappointed in what they can offer you.

The next option you have after the piercing kit’s instructions are the ones on the internet, and again, the information there is very faulty! You don’t want your new body piercing to be dependent on what some random Wikipedia editor has to say. You have no clue where the information on the internet is coming from, and you might not be able to figure out their exact sources either. Especially if you’re working with an eyebrow ring or anything else on your face, that gets dangerous fast.

By contrast, when you go with a real piercer the support you’ll get will be much better than the written instructions in a piercing kit. A body piercing specialist will be able to give you all the answers you need to make you feel secure in your healing process, and they can give you the answers to all the questions you didn’t know to ask too. That means you’ll have all the advice you need to be able to heal your body piercing perfectly.

And finally, your body piercing specialist will be able to make recommendations of aftercare products, body jewelry, and other hot tips the way only a real, trained person can. You can find out what all the best antibacterial ointments are for cleaning and dressing your piercing wound afterward, and you can probably buy new body jewelry after your piercing has healed at the piercer’s parlor. As if piercing kits weren’t bad enough, they usually don’t even come with top quality jewelry!

You might need some advice

A professional piercer doesn’t just give you a body piercing. They can also give you advice on what the best piercing for you would be! If you’re wondering about exactly what kind of piercing you want, you probably won’t get much help from a piercing kit. You’re going to need an expert who can tell you what you’re looking for and help you make it happen. Just like going to a tattoo artist and coming up with a design, a piercing is collaborative!

You might also have questions about what style of piercing would be good for you, even if you have a good idea of what kind of body piercing you want. A piercing kit can’t help you choose between the finer points of what length, rise, and gauge might be the perfect fit for you. The only person who can do that is a piercer who has gone through training specifically to be a source of information to people like you! 

Finally, the actual piece of body jewelry that the piercer will sell to you is probably going to be much more high quality, and it comes with much better advice than what your piercing kit is going to offer you. If you go into a piercing parlor looking for a high-quality belly ring, you know you’re going to get it. If you go with a piercing kit, you’re probably going to find yourself with a very low-quality piece, and once you get pierced you usually have to leave the original jewelry in for six weeks! 

You could really hurt yourself

If you really think heating up a needle and jabbing it into yourself with no prior experience is a good idea, we can’t stop you from trying it. But we seriously urge you to think before you try to give yourself a body piercing. Not only can you make much bigger holes than intended, but you could also even rip a delicate bit of cartilage, meaning you can never wear a cartilage earring like this one! That could result in some lasting damage from your piercing kit that would be nowhere near as cool looking like your piercing would have been. 

Further, you might not actually know how to sterilize a needle as well as you think you do, and we’ve been over how piercing kits don’t actually include the best instructions. You could end up giving yourself a body piercing that gets infected, meaning at the very least a lot of pain and a course of antibiotics. At the worst, you could end up losing the body part you thought was going to look so cool with a piercing in it! 

The fact is that there are so many ways a body piercing could go wrong, you’re very likely to hit at least one of them if you do things yourself with a piercing kit. If you try to do a body piercing for yourself, you’ll probably find you feel like you have no idea what you’re doing; you should really listen to that instinct. There’s very little that needs to go wrong when it comes to poking needles into your body for the damage to be pretty significant. 

By contrast, when you go to a piercing specialist not only do you know that your body piercing is going to be put in right, but also that it’s going to heal right. Your piercer is going to make sure you go home with plenty of antibacterial products to clean your body piercing with, and no piercing kit can compare to the skill of someone who pierces for a living. If you were to do a comparison, you’d see that a body piercing from a piercer is a million times healthier and more skillfully done than one from a piercing kit.

—

So what have we learned here? NEVER use a piercing kit! Always go to someone who’s qualified and trained to give you a body piercing, rather than trying to pierce yourself. There’s just too much danger involved when you make yourself into a guinea pig for your own piercing practice. After all, do you really think your local piercer go their skills right on the first try? So why do you think you could give yourself the perfect piercing without any experience?

And it’s not just a matter of how good the piercing looks! You could end up with some serious health issues like an infection if you were to put in a piercing improperly, especially if you don’t care for it afterward. When you don’t have a professional piercer’s care and skill, you can not only end up with a badly placed piercing but also a lack of support and advice on how to care for your new body piercing! A piercing kit hurts you not just in the short term, but also in the long term. 

Plus, it’s so nice to go to a piercing parlor and talk to someone whose whole job it is to make you and your new body piercing look good! It’s not like a piercing kit can chat with you about the latest piercing styles and give you suggestions about what might look best on you. When you see a professional, you can then be sure that you’re being cared for physically and emotionally, giving you the overall best possible piercing experience.

Have you ever had a bad experience with a piercing kit? Do you have a local piercer you swear by? What do you need from a body piercing experience? Let us know in the comments, and we can chat about our favorite obsession: body jewelry!