The Piercing Bible

I received this message from a piercer on the East Coast:

Thanks for all your great articles. I always skip right to your article first thing when I get a new pain magazine. I bought the Piercing Bible last year for curiosity and I must say, I was surprised at how well written and how much content it had. Can't say I agree with everything but I respect you for your work in this industry and appreciate the information you put out there. We had to fight over your book in the shop when we first got it. When we come across questions between ourselves as piercers we use your book to get your opinion. Thanks. K.

My response:
Thanks for your message and for your feedback. I know there will be an update to The Piercing Bible eventually, and I'm interested in hearing about what other piercers disagree with. If you'd care to share an of your thoughts on this, I'd take your input into consideration during my rewrite.

And that goes for any of you readers too. I am interested in the feedback of other professionals, so don't hesitate to contact me with your perspectives. It could result in a change in the first revised edition of The Piercing Bible.

That's the title of an article I was interviewed for that provides important information for parents about piercings their teens might get or have. The Piercing Bible was quoted and credited.

It starts off:

When done properly, piercing is safe. Elayne Angel is the author of The Piercing Bible – The Definitive Guide to Safe Body Piercing and the Medical Liaison for the Association of Professional Piercers (APP) and recommends following standard safety precautions for a safe piercing experience:

• the piercing should be done in a hygienic facility by a trained, experienced worker
• sterile, disposable equipment should be used
• jewelry of the correct material, size, and style should be inserted
• proper aftercare instructions should be followed

Click here to read the rest of the article.

It's finally here! The long-awaited website redesign that I've been dreaming about for so long. Huge thanks to Rich Rudzinski of Tragic Media for doing a great job and being patient with me while I asked a million questions. The site is done in Drupal, which is new to me, so please bear with me as I make the necessary corrections. I'm aware that the images from previous blog posts didn't get imported with the text, so I'm working on that. Thanks for your patience.

Feel free to let me know how you like the new design, and if you have any comments, suggestions, or corrections email me.

I received this message from a Facebook friend:

The design for my website www.piercingbible.com is just about to be updated, and that's surely for the best. But, one slightly sad (but unavoidable) thing that is that my old Guestbook will be no more, and the posts will be unavailable. Some related good news is that all of my previous blog posts will still be available in the archives on the updated site. So, I've decided to make a blog post "Best of the Guestbook" to preserve some of the entries. Here we go!

The Board of Directors for the Association of Professional Piercers met at my home in the Yucatan of Mexico this week (they left yesterday). We had a very productive meeting. One important task that got accomplished is that the new brochures I wrote for the organization have been posted on the Association of Professional Piercers website. Here's the link to one on Jewelry for Initial Piercings, and the other on Jewelry for Healed Piercings. This is material that was never previously available from the APP. You can download a .pdf file of all of the available pamphlets. It is so great to have brochures in print form, too. They can be purchased from the APP office. From the APP website:

I was reading a public profile of a young man on an online dating site. He seems like a cool dude, studying computer science with a desire to be a professional piercer. I'm not actually looking for a date--I'm happily married. But I did notice that among his self-summary and favorite foods and music, he listed his favorite books, which included The Piercing Bible:

Books: demonata series and the pendragon series. Oh, and the piercing bible. WAY better than any other bible. It has FACTS.

I ran into this post in which The Piercing Bible was described as "Required Reading" on the topic of body modification:

This entry is more geared towards apprentices and those into the “past” surrounding our body modification industry/community,etc. However this is also very much available, immensely encouraged, for those out there who are clients/consumers or just general people interested in Body Modification. I believe these to be required reading (regardless if you agree or disagree with whats written), specifically for the typical apprentice that is starting out. They should read them and then approach their instructor/teacher/mentor and spark up discussions and healthy debates regarding this stuff.

Two books were listed in the post, (one other in addition to my own). I'm honored by the company, as the other book was Shannon Larratt's Opening Up Body Modification Interviews 1995-2008.