My nose piercing experience was almost a rock star movie thing. I was out with a friend going down my fourth beer when my friend started persuading me to get a tattoo in the studio right in front of the bar. After a whole hour of hesitation, I convincingly said I wouldn’t do it (my friend, a Colombian dude, was already full of tattoos, including a cartoon scene of two pigs having sex on his forearm). Instead, I suggested a nose piercing.
In the end, I gathered a fair bit of both practical and theoretical knowledge right before going through another beer and entering the studio. In this article, I have poured out my whole baggage of information for you to be prepared. After all, you might be a beer away.
That was the first question of a long interrogation I submitted to the piercing artist. The dude was pretty honest, I must say. ‘The nose is a fragile cartilage,’ he said, fully covered in piercings and tattoos, and straight away, ‘do you want it through the nasal ala, the columella…?’
I went for the ala and got my nose pierced while a tear ran down my cheek, and my friend laughed out loud, filming the scene with his phone camera. At the risk of being called a cry-cry baby, I must admit it didn’t hurt much. The nose is more sensitive than most other areas of the face, but getting a needle punched through it is not too painful. The most disturbing part was actually seeing a needle right in front of my face hanging there. So it was mostly psychological.
When it gets to nose piercings, the real danger is not whether it’ll be painful or not, but rather if it will get infected. We all know friends who’ve gotten piercings, and most of you out there must have seen pretty nasty stuff, just like me. I remember a specific friend who got his upper ear pierced and saw a huge pimple growing out of it. So not only had he wasted time and money, but he now had to go to the dermatologist to deal with what seemed to be a disgusting, growing volcano on his ear.
Not only that, but getting your piercing in a dodgy studio can even get you viruses and infections as serious as HIV, hepatitis, or tetanus; it is definitely no light matter. And this is without mentioning allergic reactions, scarring, keloids, and nerve damage!
The last important thing to consider is the quality of the piercing. Make sure you get some proper gold or titanium, it will not be expensive anyways (if you don’t go for bling-bling dimensions), and it will be well worth the price. Cheaper metals can cause irritations and infections and even hurt you due to oxidation or stain on your skin.
Aftercare instructions will be given by any responsible body modification artist, but I might as well give a few pieces of advice from my personal experience. First things first, the nose is a prime spot for bacteria, just like the mouth, so you want to keep it extremely clean. The first few days are crucial, as you will get to know if there is any infection. I suggest using alcohol as often as possible, don’t settle for just soap or hot water (obvious as it is, many people don’t seem to care about it.)
Another important thing is the sleeping position. You want to avoid any pressure on the nose area, so make sure you sleep on your side or back for a few nights at least. Oh, and believe me on this, you will feel an almost irresistible urge to play with your piercing all the time. Don’t do it. This will surely be the most difficult part of the aftercare process.
This is a question I definitely had in mind. Be careful if you ever take your piercing off, say, because you have a job interview or whatever, especially if you’ve got your piercing done not too long ago. I waited for something like 3 months and then had an important interview with my Ph.D. director. I took my piercing out, and after 2 hours, I put it back inside. It had already closed! Fortunately, I was able to press and pierce through it, but it was painful, and it bled, so I had to go through the whole healing and aftercare procedure all over again.
With time, you will slowly become familiar with all sorts of cool, ingenious piercings, and you should bear this in mind when you choose a spot. For now, I just want to give you a brief guide on the different types of nose piercing. Here we go with the most common ones.
Nostril Piercing
This is the classic one. You can either go for a ring or a little ball or a diamond-shaped piercing. Even though it is the classic perforation, it is actually one of the most complicated ones, it requires a lot of good care, and it might take up to 3 months to heal properly.
Septum or Bullring Piercing
This one is a less common type, but it seems to have gotten more popular in the last few years. It is basically a perforation of the little strip of cartilage between the two nostrils. The problem is that it’s quite painful, it will even hurt as you speak on the first few days after the procedure, and it might take up to 6 months to heal.
Bridge Piercing
This one is even rarer than the former, but it also seems to be getting more popular as people try to differentiate themselves more than more. The perforation is performed at the top of the nasal bridge, right between the eyes. It only goes through the skin, so it is not painful, and it only takes about 2 months to heal.
I have come across a good bunch of people who wanted a nose piercing to improve the look of their nose, whether because it was too big, bent, or something else. If this is your case, you might be interested in checking about plastic surgery. For instance, the price of a nose job in Turkey is very affordable as rhinoplasties have become a common procedure. They’re also quite safe due to high demand.
For those of you who are still in the bar going through a beer and considering whether you should listen to your drunk, pierced, and tattooed friend ad do something crazy, think about this: if you follow all the above instructions carefully, the worst that can happen is that you’ll take your piercing off after a few weeks. The experience is worth it, however. YOLO, and thanks for reading!