piercing information

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.

I received this message from a Facebook friend:

I received an email from a woman who received a triangle that was so painful I was certain it wasn't properly placed without seeing a photo. She wrote:

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:

If you're interested in the subject of nipple piercings, I highly suggest you take a look at this post called "Let's Talk about Nipples" on The Pierced Consumer, and this one called "Nipple Piercings and the Long Haul", which is the second part of the article. The blog is written by Cloud, and she's the woman that The Piercing Bible is dedicated to (and if you open your copy to the dedications page you will learn why). Here I am, posting about these great blog articles, when I noticed that The Piercing Bible was actually mentioned in one of these posts. Cool!

I received this message from a reader on my Facebook page. How amazing to hear that getting his Prince Albert piercing has drastically changed his self-esteem and perception of his body!

After doing a lot of reading and talking my co-worker Nycole, I decided to pierce my PA. (This was her first.) Much of the information we read and studied came from you. This piercing has drastically changed my personal opinion on my body view. Your work means so much to me and even more so now. Thank you 1000 times over.

It is so validating to my work to get feedback like this (though I want to reiterate that the book is not intended as a "how-to-pierce" guide).

The entry I wrote about safer sex got picked up as a Valentine's Day post by another blog, The Pierced Consumer. Cloud, the woman who writes the blog is not a piercer--she is a piercee.  She is very knowledgeable about many aspects of piercings, and provides a different perspective than mine, which (naturally) is from a piercer's point of view. You can read about her and why she started the blog, here. If you are a pierced consumer and looking for additional information, I suggest you pay her blog a visit regularly. She is very responsive to answering your questions.

Since I get so many piercing questions, I thought it would be good to share the information I provide with anyone who is interested. So, I'm going to be posting the questions and answers as they come along as a regular feature of this blog.