Sep

Lately, I’ve been missing my lip piercings, which were removed in 2008 after a few good years of jacking up my grill. Being one who is obsessed with perfection when it comes to modifications, how did I allow myself to chip a tooth and create a gap between two of them? Simply put: a nervous habit of gnawing on my lower lip, which I have been doing for as long as I can remember. Biting lip + jewelry + teeth = disaster. Out the jewelry came, despite having loving stretched the piercings from their original 14g (1.6mm) to 10g (2.4mm) in size and I now have two indentations below my lower lip to show for it.

Almost every piercing I’ve obtained has been received on whim and has been cared for & appreciated for whatever length of time it happens to be given as being part of my bodily aesthetic. So, today was no exception to my track record of being pierced on a whim: thanks to Matt Southwood, at Enigma, in San Diego… I am now the proud bearer of a vertical labret!

One of the nicer things about the vertical labret, as opposed to “standard” lip piercings, is that the jewelry does not enter the mouth. This makes it a touch easier to heal, as it is not fully (only partially) exposed to the disgusting cesspool that is the human mouth and it does not touch the gums or teeth in any manner. I’m hoping this will help me to avoid tapping it with my teeth when I do bite my lower lip (which I tend to do on the sides, rather than the front portion where the piercing is) and thus, allow the piercing to remain in place for a long time.

Eating and drinking has been a challenge and will more than likely remain as such for quite some time. I’m failing at drooling when I drink water (you can laugh, it’s okay) and I need to cut my food into tiny bites and use utensils to deliver the food into my mouth – even if I feel completely silly doing so… ever eaten a cheeseburger with a fork and knife? – without touching my lower lip or the jewelry itself. The swelling isn’t helping matters, either, but ice water is definitely helping combat the soreness that accompanies swelling (and is, of course, keeping the swelling to a minimum).

Jessy used my Flip to video the entire procedure, and I extracted some shots from that, to share here. They’re not as detailed as in the video itself, since they are frames taken from video, but they’ll do fine for illustrating the fun. I chose to make them black & white, as you can see detail a bit better without the color being washed out. The last shot, in color, was taken with my iPhone about an hour afterward. The pictures show Matt marking my lip, the piercing procedure itself, inserting the jewelry, adjusting it, clean-up afterward, and voila… the final product!

If you’re wondering… on a pain scale of 1-10, this was easily a 7 and amongst the worse I’ve felt. Matt did a spectacular job, but my face – and lips especially – are extremely sensitive, to the point of being ticklish. Nowhere else on my body am I ticklish or sensitive in the same manner, so I’m certain this factors into the higher rating for this piercing. And since I’m asked a lot: the septum was a 0.5 ;)