Second only to the hair in my inbox. The questions are always the same three — did it hurt, can you hide it, and where should I get one done — so here they are answered at length, along with the things I got wrong, which is a longer list than the things I got right.
The pain, ranked honestly
The septum is not the worst and everybody assumes it is. It is a sharp couple of seconds and your eyes stream immediately, which feels dramatic but is a reflex rather than pain. It is over before you have finished reacting to it. If you can sit through a lobe you can sit through this.
Cartilage is the one people underestimate. The piercing itself is a hard pinch, but the aching afterwards goes on for weeks, and you will find every single way to catch it — hairbrush, jumper, pillow, headphones, the strap of a bag. That low-grade constant irritation is genuinely worse than any of the sharp moments.
The actual worst thing I have had done was a surface piercing that rejected. That one hurt going in, hurt while it was healing, and then slowly worked its way back out over four months, which is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds. Some placements simply do not take on some bodies and there is no way to know in advance.
Healing takes far longer than the leaflet says
Lobes are a couple of months. Septum, about three. Cartilage can easily take a year, and it will feel completely fine at week six, which is the trap. A piercing that has stopped hurting is not a piercing that has healed. The channel is still forming under the surface long after the outside has calmed down.
Changing the jewellery early is the single most common reason things go wrong, and nearly everybody does it, including me. You get bored, the starter bar is ugly, and you swap it at eight weeks — and then you have an irritated, angry piercing that takes three months to settle and might not settle at all.
Aftercare is saline, twice a day, and otherwise leaving it entirely alone. Not turning it. Not touching it to check. Not applying anything a shop sold you in a small bottle with a long ingredient list. The whole protocol is: salt water, clean hands, patience.
How to tell a good studio from a bad one
Needles, not guns, for everything including lobes. A gun forces blunt jewellery through tissue rather than removing a channel, and it cannot be properly sterilised. Any place still using one on a face is telling you a great deal about the rest of their standards.
Implant-grade titanium, and they should say that without being asked. Surgical steel contains nickel and a surprising number of people find out they react to it the hard way. Ask what the jewellery is. A good piercer is pleased you asked; a bad one is vague.
And look at healed photographs on their page rather than fresh ones. Fresh piercings all look fine. Healed ones show placement and angle, which is the actual skill and the thing that determines whether it sits right on your face for the next ten years.
Hiding it, and the one I would not repeat
The septum flips up. That is most of the appeal and the reason it is the facial piercing to get if your circumstances are complicated. A horseshoe rotates up inside the nose and is genuinely invisible unless someone is looking directly up your nostril, which is not standard workplace behaviour.
The one I would not get again is a lobe placement I had done at nineteen in a shopping centre with a gun, sitting at an angle that means one earring always looks slightly wrong next to the others. It healed fine. It is simply in the wrong place forever, and no amount of good jewellery fixes an angle.
That is the real regret category with piercings, exactly as it is with tattoos: not the decision, the placement. Spend the extra twenty pounds on somebody who will mark it, hand you a mirror, and adjust it three times before they pick up a needle.
Needles not guns, titanium not steel, healed photos not fresh ones, and leave the jewellery alone for twice as long as you think. Get those four right and the only thing left to decide is where, which is the fun part and the one you should take longest over.
See all of them properly, up close ✦
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