This is now totally my favourite piercing ever. I’ve had a fairly close-knit run of colds the last week and I think my body has stepped up its healing game. After a pretty long 9ish months, this is all-but healed. It still aches a little bit, and I don’t think this will ever be my natural sleep side again, but there (gross alert!) is no leakage of any kind from it now. Just a smooth, perfect little hole (8mm).

I just wanted to take a little bit of time to confirm to anyone who also read Conch Stretching; not for the faint-hearted that you should not stretch your conch (or any other part of your body that’s made of cartilage). You shouldn’t really go see a guy and get him to punch a hole in it either, but if you must have holes, go for a dermal punch. It’s gross, it hurts like fuck and it bleeds like crazy for about a week. You seriously might think you’re going to die, but it is so worth it. I wouldn’t trade this piercing for all battered Mars Bars in Scotland now.

People have started asking me how I did it now, as well, so hopefully that will continue and I can actually take it out and show them!

Now that the redness has chilled out a little, a photo of the new detail and shading of Charlotte’s new tattoo. I’m super jealous of it. It’s so good.

Charlotte just started this tattoo today. I’m so jealous. Courtesy of Maris @ Pauly’s Tattoo, Southampton

Since I dreaded my hair and got pierced, I’ve worked for a FTSE Top 100 company, an HR and Payroll software provider and now a fast-growing creative agency. None of these companies even mentioned my piercings or dreads, and there were people at the former two who were obsessed with how you dread hair and how you stretch piercings. Why is it, then, that when I speak to people about work the first thing the majority ask is if I find it difficult to get work looking the way I look? If I were more self-conscious, this might have started to get to me but I always assume they’re talking about the hair and ears. I guess we’re in pretty radically changing times right now with regard to body mods. I see so many people around with pretty large stretches (I would say that my lobe is above average, but I’ve seen some people in the street with at least 35mm) and this is indicative to me of a wider acceptance of body modifications and a general ability to separate an individual’s personality and the trinkets with which they choose to adorn themselves (thanks, Howard).

For me, what it comes down to is that I have enough confidence in my skills and professionalism for my appearance to remain irrelevant. This coupled with the fact that I honestly wouldn’t want to be part of a company who were that fixated on the personal appearance of their employees. After all, they would be benefitting from having me on the payroll, and if they can’t see that then that’s their problem. This piece of rhetoric is something that’s very important to me. A lot of my friends say that their only reservation about getting stretches is that they think it would have a negative effect on their ability to get work in anything other than a tattoo parlour, but I strongly believe that that’s not the case anymore. I also believe that life is too short to not do something as personally gratifying and empowering as self-modification just because some buttoned-down, traditionalist HR type can’t see past whatever stereotype they associate with a pierced individual.

All that aside, don’t even stretch your conch. I really mean this. It looks amazing, and it’s easily tied for first place with my lobe, but it isn’t worth the pain, lost sleep and probably permanent scarring that I seem to have been blessed with with mine. What looks like a relatively healthy stretch on the surface:

Can sometimes be causing its owner a lot more discomfort and, in some cases, mental anguish (I’m deeply dreading the inevitability of a dermal punch!) if you delve deeper.