If I’m understanding Ashy’s email, she made the mistake of putting some sort of aggressive antiseptic onto her fresh eyebrow piercing (done by Sean at Creative Tattoos and Piercings in Byron Bay) causing it to get irritated and ultimately seriously infected and in need of antibiotics to clear it up… Not that it can’t get worse, but this is definitely one of the more unhappy eyebrow piercings I’ve seen!

See more in “Eyebrow Barbells“ (Eyebrow Piercing)

xTVRx was stretching his nipples using jewelry wrapped in PTFE tape and woke up in the morning with this terrible bubble of pus. Way too gross, so I put the picture after the break!!!

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“Let all red roses bloom signify that your around”…

    By Adam at Electric Haven in Tempe, AZ.

Xeni demonstrates how not to stretch your lobes as she tries to force her lobes from 1/2″ to 5/8″ before they were ready… Ouch :P

See more in “Ear Stretching (past 1/2″)“ (Ear Piercing)

Lexci pulled this mangled and tarnished nostril jewelry out of a customer, who’d worn it for six months before giving up on it… I don’t think the picture quite captures how unpleasant it looked.

The picture for this entry is after the break.

Following up a little on Mark’s lip silicone and the questions about removal, Fignutz had some problems with a genital injection in which the material extruded through skin leaving a fistulous (nonhealing) tract that took two years of debridement (dead tissue cutting and removal) to heal. He explains,

The initial mod looked like many of those in this section [members link] — something potato or tuber-like. Huge, but ugly with loss of sensation. If you must do this mod, less is better. It’s like the gambler who can’t quit while s/he is ahead. Eventually the odds prevail to your disadvantage. Either tissue necrosis (cell death) due to pressure from the large volume of injected material occurs; the injected material acts as an irritant or toxin; infection occurs; and/or the preservative found in the injected matrix causes a local immune reaction (seen with “KY” and other water soluble lubricants, or some forms of saline used to reconstitute collagen).

Although it is never safe, wise or recommended to perform this genital mod, by far the only substance I would consider is Saline (isotonic 0.9% WITHOUT preservative, sometimes called “Bacteriostatic Saline). I will repeat that it MUST be isotonic (0.9%)saline , which means it is approximately the same concentration of sodium chloride (NaCl)as the normal surrounding tissue. Several other concentrations do exist, as well as injectable sterile water, but these (including water) are guaranteed to cause tissue damage. The modding and enlargement effects of saline, being water soluable, does wear off in a relatively short period of time, so it is a temporary mod, which is usually a good thing. Repeated administration can lead to scarring, fibrosis, chordee and infection however, so unless you’re willing to take the risk, I suggest you get yourself some nice ink, or a frenum, like I did. (I won’t get into the risks of THAT for now!)

Luckily it looks like he’s healed quite well. Many people are not so lucky — check out the interview with Impgrin for someone who had far less luck.

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Sorry for not posting more yesterday, but I had my head slammed in a car door (don’t ask!) and got a concussion and didn’t feel like writing. Let me start off today with a pictorial story from “a young lady from Chicago-land” and her earlobe tearing misadventures in the Ukraine involving stitching… I’m actually not convinced this needed to be stitched (I think it would have healed on its own, personally), but I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth!

This story is in her own words — continue reading to see what happened.

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Yowch! Here’s a good reason not to do DIY surface piercing unless you totally know what you’re doing!

As you can see in the before-and-after below, like so many people these days (seriously, I see so many people removing their stretched earlobes every day now), Pen Di’Panda decided he’d had enough. A couple more somewhat disconcerting photos of his taking a pair of scissors to his lobes continue after the break!

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With sincere apologies to the wearer, I really hate saying anything negative about someone’s body modification, but you know, when it comes to tattoo quality, I would never tackle a portrait until I was very confident as a tattoo artist, because the implications of getting it even a little off are so unpleasant. It’s really important to understand I think that doing a portrait is a very different set of skills, and someone can be a quite solid artist on other levels but have difficulty with them… It’s very, very important when you’re looking at someone’s portfolio that you see pieces in the style of what you want.