Removing Jewelry, The How To and the Why?

In this new section of DaVo's Piercing Blog, I will be covering the reason to remove jewelry and the step by step why to safely remove jewelry from piercings. I would have to say that a large portion of the calls and e-mails that I get are from clients in a panic because they have to remove a piece of jewelry for medical or other reasons. Usually this is during a stressful time when the last thing on their mind is their body piercings.

Body piercing jewelry by it's nature is designed to be in the body for long periods of time and not to fall out on it's own easily.  When designing jewelry the key factors that must be considered are:

• That the jewelry material is acceptable to the body with little or no negative reactions. 
• That the finish and material is durable enough to avoid the body wearing off the finish and braking down the material.
• That the design, material and finish will not cause discomfort or damage to the wearer
• Last is the jewelry design going easily fall out on it's own and that it can be worn for long periods of time with little or no maintenance. 

It's that last item is a balancing game, because you want jewelry that can stay in the piercing continually to avoid the piercing closing but you also need to have a closer design that allows the wearer to remove the jewelry to change the jewelry, for medical reasons or whatever. To use a geeky tech analogy it's just like software user interface. It always comes down to security vs easy of uses. You want the user to have the freedom to use their device as they wish but you also want to make sure they can't damage the thing. 

With piercing the evolution seems to have gone from Security to easy of uses and I've found that with fresh piercing security is often the better option. Here is a list of the most common closers from most secure to least:

• Fix Beaded Ring(bead or ball is connected to one side). Really used.
• Captive Bead Ring/Segment ring(Tension of the ring holds a bead, ball or other item in place)
• Barbells(a threaded ball or other end is thread and screws on to a post or into a post)
• Push Pin(an end with a stem wrapped with wire or threading is pushed into a hallow posy)
• O-ring(a post or plug with indents or groove that a rubber o-ring sets into)
• Fishtail, Retainers,Screw or L-bend(Fixed ball or end on one end of a post. The other side is bent to set on the opposite side of the ball to keep the jewelry from falling out)
• Flanged(Most often used with plug where the sides of the jewelry flange outward like a trumpet to a larger gauge than the center)

There are a few others but these are the most common. In future blogs I will cover the steps to safely remove them in the Jewelry Removal section. 

Also I will be covering some of the medical procedures that require removal of jewelry and the reasons behind it and I plan on covering a other reasons that jewelry should be removed in the Reasons For Removing Jewelry Section.