Tapers/expanders that illustrate different gauges

Gauge: Measurement for body jewelry, abbreviated ‘g’ or ‘ga’, which refers to the shaft’s thickness. Low numbers are larger. Regular ear piercing usually starts around 18 or 20 gauge.

Gauging: A term sometimes used to describe stretching a piercing to a larger size. This is an incorrect usage, though, since gauge refers to a measurement. Saying that you’re “gauging” your piercing would be like saying you’re “inching” something or “galloning” something.

Stretching: The correct term for increasing the size of your piercing to accommodate larger gauged jewelry.

Materials:

Acrylic: A type of plastic used in large gauge jewelry because it’s lightweight, inexpensive, and comes in awesome colors and designs, including UV reactive styles. Acrylic isn’t great for new piercings or if you’re in the process of stretching, because they can irritate newly stretched skin, and some people will always find them irritating. I know some people who can only wear acrylic styles for a few hours, never as their “regular” jewelry. They don’t seem to have that effect on me, but it’s something to be aware of.

Amber: Fossilized resin usually goldish yellow, often used as inlays in metal or organic jewelry.

Bronze: A metal alloy usually combining copper and tin. It can temporarily give a greenish discolor to skin, but if it’s on an open wound it can be permanent discoloration.

Glass: I’m sure you already know what glass is. Glass jewelry is hard and can be transparent and multi-colored.

Gold: A soft rare metal. For body jewelry, at least 18 karat is recommended due to allergic reactions to the other metals gold is mixed with to create different colors and strengths.

Hematite: One of my favorite materials, hematite is the blackish mineral form of iron oxide.

Lucite: A kind of plastic.

Nickel: Nickel can cause allergic reactions, so it’s not ideal for body jewelry, but it’ll sometimes be combined with stainless steel to give the stainless stell strength and prevent corrosion.

Niobium: A heavy, shiny, soft, and bendable metal used in body jewelery since it’s hypo-allergenic.

An acrylic plug with O-rings

Nylon: Used in temporary jewelry, but not for longer term jewelery since it’s absorptive.

Organic: Means any kind of natural material like stone, wood, bone, etc.

Palladium: A silver-white metal.

PTFE (Teflon): Stands for Polytetrafluoroethylene, trade name Teflon. It’s a waxy, smooth texture added to plastic jewelery to make flexible, non-stick styles. Useful for x-rays or during pregnancy.

Pyrex: A heat and chemical resistant glass.

Silver (sterling silver): A white-ish metal, which causes a reaction in many people, so it usually shouldn’t be used for healing piercings.

Stainless steel: An iron alloy containing nickel, other metals, and other elements like carbon. Steel jewelry will not cause an allergic reaction in most people. Surgical stainless steel or surgical steel specifically refers to stainless steel that releases very little nickel and is therefore less likely to cause an allergic reaction.

Titanium: A very strong, very corrosion-resistant, light-weight white metal. Used in surgical implants because it is chemically inert. Can be anodized to add colors.

White Gold: An alloy of gold, copper and palladium or nickel. The alloy with palladium is more expensive and often called palladium white gold. When it’s made with nickel, it’s cheaper, and will cause problems if you’re allergic to nickel.

Yellow Gold: An alloy of fine gold, fine copper and silver that ends up a yellow color.

Style terms:

Twister barbells

Barbell: A curved or straight bar with a ball on each end. Can be internally or externally threaded. A barely curved barbell may be called a banana barbell, some are more spiral shaped and can be called a twister. A J-bar or J-post is barely curved with a sharp bend at one end, usually used in navel piercings.

Bull ring: A U-shaped barbell with a ball at both ends typically used in septum piercings.

Captive bead ring: Circular jewelry with a single bead connecting both ends.

Diameter: The size of a ring, measured straight across on the inside.

Orbital: Type of piercing where a ring goes through the body part twice.

O-ring: Round rubber ring, used on piercing jewelry such as retainers or tunnels that  helps keep them in place.

Plug: A generic term for jewelry used in larger gauge piercings, usually in the ear.

Retainer: A piece of jewelry made of clear acrylic, used to make the piercing non-noticeable. These are only for healed piercings.

Taper or expander: Cone-shaped or needle-shaped piece which is often used for stretching a piercing to a larger size. When a gauge is given, it refers to the larger end.

Threading: The ridges that screw together two pieces. This is the same concept as the threading on a screw or bolt. Externally threaded has the ridges on the outside of the shaft. Internally threaded has them on the inside and is usually preferred since the smooth shaft is less likely to hurt the piercing.

Tunnel: A circular piece of jewelry that’s hollow in the middle. This is my favorite kind to wear because it highlights that I’ve got a bit hole there! Also called an eyelet or flesh tunnel.

Okay, that’s enough terms! This actually barely scratches the surface of terminology related to large gauge jewelry, and the styles mostly relate to those for ears. But it’s a start! Any other terms you’ve run across that you’re confused about?

Here’s the jewelry I stretched with:

And I do own some other pretty jewelry:

But mostly I wear my tunnels all the time, because I really want to show off that there are big holes in my ears!

First, I wanted to show my dreads hanging down. I found this one that shows some of the beads and wraps I have in now:

But I hardly ever wear it down. Most of the time, my hair is piled on top of my head sticking out every which way:

I hope to post some more photos once I get the dreadlock re-do project finished. I’m going to trim it a bit and add lots of new wraps, so it might look very different.

According to this chart, I

• Have been to prison.
• Have a 67% chance of dragons or wings.
• Am a cute little princess, now with real tattoo accessory!

Although I haven’t been to prison, I have two tattoos in those zones. And I do have wings on me, but they’re in the prison zone, not the wing zone. The one that most closely matches a tattoo that I have is the cute little princess one, since the tattoo I got on my ankle I got entirely for then-current fad/conformity reasons.

“Will never have a job that pays taxes” describes me pretty well, though I don’t have tattoos there. Maybe I’m overdue for a face tattoo.

How about you? Where are your tattoos, and does this chart peg you right or miss the mark?

Pulling our penguins from the book Your Personal Penguin, Joshua got the penguin from the page with, “Look at these wings, so perfect to hold you.” I got the dancing penguin from the cover (mine’s on the left). They’re about the same size, the photos are just taken from different distances.

Check out the tattoo artist’s blog for more on the tattoo as well as other Alice tattoos.

Anyway, after a shower the other day, I decided the time had come, season notwithstanding. I picked 6 inches as the right number. I took each individual dreadlock, measured up six inches, and snipped it off.

Here’s the pile of cut-off sections laid out on the bathroom counter. It looks like a lot of hair.

However, when I gathered it all into a bunch, you can see that it’s not so much in volume overall. I have really thin hair, so even with dreadlocks, there’s not a lot to work with.

I bunched them up like this to take a look at the ends where you can see into the interior of the dreads. Some people when they cut their dreads find that the insides are kind of gross. If they mistakenly started their dreads with wax, there’ll be a lot of wax buildup on the insides. Or there will just be accumulated oil or whatever, especially if they’ve had trouble drying their dreads. I was happy to find that the insides of mine were pretty clean and dry.

One result of the cut is that they look a little more like dreadlocks now. Before, a good portion of that extra six inches was wispy undreaded hair. The full length of each dread is tangled now, giving them a more solid dread-y look.

I still haven’t gotten started on re-decorating them yet. Also planned for this summer is to phase out the dark colored wool wraps and add in some bright colored hippie beads and bright wraps. I’ll post pics of that when it happens, I’m sure!

In the meantime, here’s a recent shot of me, post-cut. It doesn’t show a lot of the dreads, but I think it’s super-cute, anyway.

Here’s an awesome video of a super-slo-mo dread flip. As a person with dreads, I love everything dread related, and this was a fantastic find. (h/t)

In case you can’t see the embedded video, check it out here.

Just a bit after making this decision, we came across the Sandra Boynton book Your Personal Penguin. In the book, a penguin declared that it wants to be the “personal penguin” of the hippo, which leads to some funny scenes with the hippo looking on in suspicion at this little penguin following it around. The penguin declares that it wants to “walk right by your side” and “be with you night and day”. There’s a Davy Jones rendition of the words in song, too, and Joshua and I were hooked. Instead of being married, we decided to be penguins.

Joshua has recently suggested that we get penguin tattoos. I was initially skeptical. See, I don’t actually like penguins. I like the idea expressed in the book, but “penguin” has taken on a new meaning for me that’s not really connected to the actual animal. I wasn’t sure I wanted a penguin tattoo on my body. Still, I love the idea of getting a tattoo with Joshua, as I don’t have one yet, and despite my non-love for penguin animals, it really is the perfect idea.

A penguin tattoo is in the planning now, for sometime in the next month. I’ll be sure to update with photos when it happens!

Rick says that he sees his tattoos as “celebrating the art of obscenity and the macabre,” arising from his love for zombies and Romero’s Living Dead movies.

When asked if he worries about how he’ll look when he gets older, Rick reveals a sentiment that I agree with: “No, fuck it. Everybody ages – me too. Are you worried about what you’re going to look like when you’re 60? It’s just life…” Unfortunately, many people in our culture are worried about what they’ll look like when they’re older, and they seem to be worried about how other people will age, too. I’ve had more than one person ask me about my tattoos and how they’ll look as I age, which is a concern I just don’t get. I’m not worried about how my boobs will look when I’m older; I’m not worried about wrinkles; I’m not worried about gray hair; and I’m not worried about my tattoos, either. I guess for people who are worried about changes to their body over time, having tattoos would be one more body feature to stress about. For me, though, everyone ages, and I expect changes to occur, including to my tattoos.

Rick comments that, “There are a lot of people I meet who just don’t understand, but there really is nothing to understand. I’m realistic, sane and intelligent.” I get this, too. There have been times when I’ve been asked why, whether it’s about tattoos or ear lobe stretching, and I don’t exactly understand the question. Why do you color your hair or choose a certain outfit over another or wear jewelry? There doesn’t have to be any deep, meaningful answer to these things. We all see ourselves in a different aesthetic light, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that others enjoy different looks for themselves than you do.

I ran across the Bizarre post about Rick by way of Sociological Images, where they discussed people acting differently based on how they’re treated.Prior to becoming tattooed, Rick describes himself as hating “pretty much everything and everybody,” and wanting “to fucking kill everybody,” which is part of why he started tattooing himself as a skeleton in the first place. After tattooing, though, that started to change:

“As time went on, I started getting all this positive feedback – people would come up to me and say how cool they thought it looked. I started getting invited to parties and bars all the time. Strangers ask to have pictures taken with me. I’ve been having so much fun with it that life has definitely changed for the better.”

Rick goes on to describe his life philosophy:

“You’ve got to respect that everyone’s different and has to do what they’ve got to do. I can’t tell you what to do, you can’t tell me what to do – but we can still get along just great.”

I’d say that Rick sounds like one pretty cool guy, and his body is an amazing piece of art. Check out the Bizarre page for the full interview and more pictures.