Piercing guns

Pretty much every professional piercer in the world will tell you that any piercing using the piercing gun is a bad idea, now id say we've probably all been pierced with the gun at some point in our lives that is down to lack of knowledge of the risks on ours and probably our parents behalf more than anything else.

Piercing guns which back in the day were designed off the cattle tag system are seriously flawed in design. They were only designed to use on the ear lobe initially but many use it in several other places on the body, the helix (upper ear) and the tragus, some are even stupid enough to pierce the lip and belly button with the gun.

The first flaw i'm going to address is the fact that the studs used in piercing guns are technically not sharp, if you examine one you will find that the point of the stud is actually more rounded or blunt, So with the power of the gun firing the stud through the lobe instead of piercing the ear it is breaking through the ear, damaging everything on the way through, Now if that's a cartilage piercing like the tragus and helix as-well as breaking the skin it also shatters the cartilage, Hence why you always hear people say when i got the top of my ear pierced it never healed, Once that cartilage shatters its just not going back together.

The other issue with these studs is they are only made in a specific size so therefore they cannot account for people with slightly larger lobes, I have had people say to me i cant get my lobes pierced because they are too big, because the person using the gun told them that. also a lot of the time iv'e had people coming into me to get the stud removed from the ear because even though they had a large lobe the person with the gun pierced them anyway, and at this point id like to point out that some of these customers were small children.
Those of us that know how to pierce have jewellery in several sizes to account for different sizes and shapes regardless of which part of your body we are piercing.
This would be one of the reasons why piercing the lip and bellybutton with the gun is a complete idiotic idea, the lip is a good bit thicker than an ear lobe and the bellybutton is larger again, And that's before i draw attention to the butterfly clip on the back of piercing studs, imagine that in your mouth. I dare you to do a google image search to see the outcome of this.

But here's the big one, the main concern. The thing the piercing gun parade wont tell you is their guns cannot be autoclaved, Therefore cannot be properly sterilised, Some wipe their guns down with antibacterial wipes and have single use cartridges but neither of these will get rid of all harmful bacteria from the gun itself, Most blood borne pathogens will still live on the gun, so if I get my ear pierced before you and your friend gets pierced after you, my blood gets transferred to you and my blood including your blood gets transferred to your friend and so on and so on!
Not that its not obvious enough ill say it anyway, this can and has lead to the transfer of serious diseases, including hiv. googling that is also a good idea.

Now in my experience the largest proportion of people pierced with guns are small children, though its only my own personal opinion that if you want to accessorize your child you would buy them a nice bracelet or hat or tshirt or something other than shooting a blunt instrument through their ears, But even if you don't agree with me on that surely you cant ignore the facts outlined above.

For more of my blog posts please check out my website http://bepierced.ie/