A Guide to Ear Piercings – Part II

Ears are important for many things. Well, perhaps mainly hearing and balance, but those are pretty massive. However, they are also a fantastic area of your body to adorn and bejewel. Piercing your ears also require quite little investment in terms of time, money – or pain, for that matter. In our last post we walked you through a short list of ear piercings – the Helix, the Daith, and the Tragus. But there are so many more to choose from for you and your piercer to get creative and play around with. So we keep going to bring you a whole range of other styles. 

Conch

Let’s start with the conch piercing. It sits in the middle portion of your ear cartilage, deriving its name from the resemblance to the spiral shell of the medium to large sea snails. It can be pierced with a stud – upper, or you can choose to let a ring wrap all away around the edge of your ear – lower. It can also depend on your particular ear anatomy what will work best. 

The area of the conch is a pretty thick piece of cartilage, so there will be quite a bit of pressure when piercing, resembling the sensation of a tragus piercing. Healing times will vary from ear to ear, but you can expect it to take between six to nine months. What you need to take into consideration is that during that time – and potentially after depending on your ear shape – you will not be able to wear earbuds. 

Industrial

One of the fastest going trends is the request for industrial piercings. Not named after an anatomical part of the ear, it is a straight barbell that connects on cartilage piercing to the other on the upper ear (the helix and antihelix). It is impressive looking, but just a small word of caution would be to consider that because of them being connected, they tend to get easily irritated. As such, it requires meticulous attention to after care and keeping them clean. 

Therefore, they also take a little longer than other piercings to heal, somewhere between nine months to a year. You also need to sleep on the other side of your head for the time it heals as well, and keeping your hair from getting snagged in the jewelry. And if you can’t wear earphones with a conch, industrial piercings do not do well with over-ear headphones.

With all the care that goes into it, an industrial piercing might not be the ultimate first-piercing choice. When and if you do decide to go for it, make sure to choose the proper size starter jewellery to allow for some swelling. Make it a simple barbell of great quality as any additional embellishments can generate too much weight, pulling at the new piercing and creating damage. It’s not the easiest of piercings, but for those prepared to stand the test of healing time, you will be rewarded with one of the more rare piercings out there.