It’s time to let go of the stigma around myriad visible piercings, writes JenBNYC.
As someone “turning-40-this-summer”-years-old, it’s quite possible all these piercings are my equivalent of a midlife crisis, desperately trying to find parking in overcrowded cartilage and lobes… but I see my piercings as a glittering map, illustrating my life story so far. They’ll show you places I’ve lived, introduce you to people who matter, celebrate occasions I’ve wanted to mark. There are love stories with friends and family threaded through; there is deep, unshakeable grief.
Of the many piercings I’ve acquired throughout the course of my life, the only ones I didn’t want were the first. My mother decided I should have my ears pierced when I was seven-years-old and took me to Ylang-Ylang, a jewellery boutique in my native New York. With eyes scrunched shut, my small hand squeezed around hers, I anticipated pain… and felt a rush of excitement instead.
The “hide the crazy” piercing era ushered in a time of secrecy. I no longer needed my mum’s permission, so I started omitting certain details… like not mentioning the ill-fated belly button ring acquired in a tattoo parlour in Oxford on my first-ever trip to the UK, aged 16. I didn’t call my mum excitedly to tell her about the “what the hell was I thinking?” nipple ring, either. It was the least likely souvenir I could have come home with after a term studying abroad in St Petersburg .
I religiously started wearing the last pair of earrings I ever saw my mother in, chunky yellow gold Cartier hoops with peridot triangles. They were so heavy that after a few months of wearing them daily, they’d stretched my first holes perilously close to the bottom of my lobes, but I didn’t want to take them off. Wearing them helped me feel like we were still connected somehow.