A Stretch of the Imagination

Saturday afternoon, I decided to go out and get my ear-pierce stretched.

For those of you who don't have the foggiest idea of what I am talking about, here it comes in simple terms: if you get your ear pierced at the mall, you're driving a 20 gauge blunt object through your ear. So, for all of you who who have those thin wire earrings, you've got 20 gauge holes in your ears.

When you enter into the world of professional piercing, you realize that you can take your ear from 20 gauge (pinhole&#41 up to 0ga (about 3/8 of an inch in diameter&#41 or even larger. My goal was to get the one piercing up to 4 gauge, because at that diameter, you have a large variety of different jewelry that you can place in your ear… from open hole grommets called eyelets to solid wooden plugs.

Janet and I got to Body Manipulations at 1pm and went to select my new 4 gauge jewelry. They had a nice steel plug that looked extremely conservative for work and I decided to go for it. Forty-five minutes later when they were ready for me, the procedure started.

The stretching procedure is relatively painless. The piercer inserts a conical taper into your existing hole, stretching it to the desired size. Paul (the piercer&#41 inserted the taper and it went through painlessly. Actually, it went through without any stretching… the weight of my old curved barbell had stretched it out to 4 gauge automatically.

So, I asked if we could make it to 2 gauge, and Paul told me that he would give it a shot. So, he went out and brought me a selection of 2ga jewelry. I picked a nice blue pyrex solid plug. However, the plug was flanged, making it larger on the ends to hold it in your ear. That meant that they needed to use a 0ga taper to get it in.

A few excruciating seconds later, I left with my new 2ga pyrex plug embedded in my left ear lobe. It's now Sunday evening, and my ear is still a little tender… but if you could see it, you would know that it was worth it.