Holes

I added 2 ear piercings. On the bottom of my lobes, I wear 3 12-gauge captive bead rings. For the 4th, I picked something different. I asked the piercer to go as far up the lobe as it still had fat rather than cartilage, and run 14-gauge labret studs through rather than another ring.

The clamps caused bruising, but most of the pain is over with. I like the look of the one round silvery stud above the 3 black rings.

Sometimes people ask the piercers to do their ears with nose "studs" (which are actually called nose bones; the end is thick to prevent sliding through. But your ears get a lot more mashing around (pillow!) than your nose, and those things will go right through and away and there goes your ear piercing. If you ask them to put in a labret stud, you will have a round ball on the front and a flat circular back. The back is attached to the post, and then the ball screws in. So you push them in through the back of the piercing, unlike "normal" earrings that you put on through the front, and then the backs tend to be prickly and to come off.

The only downside is that the labret stud is hollow inside and has a "lip" on the edge so that the ball can screw in, and when you are freshly pierced and the piercer sticks this through the new hole, you will have a moment of pain, unlike sliding through a solid ring. That's no big deal. The piercer must just press the stud through quickly instead of trying to go slow. Then s/he screws the bead onto the front, and the pain is over.

Beats the hell out of Claire's Accessories or Piercing Pagoda any day!