TRENDS IN THE INDUSTRY

CHRISTINA SHULL
Integrity Piercing

When Alicia Silverstone starred in Aerosmith’s “Cryin’” video, she was a young woman dealing with heartbreak by running away and getting her navel pierced. Please note that the piercing in the video is staged as her navel had previously been pierced by Paul King. Subsequently women everywhere flocked to their local piercer for an adorable and potentially rebellious navel piercing of their own. While this was the first large-scale body piercing trend inspired by the media, this was only the beginning.

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by Luis Garcia

Though it might not seem it to some, our industry is a fairly new one. One of the things I find so amazing about body piercing is how much it has changed and evolved over the last 20 years. When I look back, I thought it would be an amusing trip down memory lane (and a good read) to recount how I’ve seen body piercing evolve as an industry, and how our clients and trends have evolved with it.

I began piercing in the early ’90s, in fact as of December 20, 2015 it will be 25 years.  At that time, very few people got pierced. You would see nostril piercings or helix piercings, navel piercings, maybe the occasional tragus or tongue piercing, but little else was prominent. Heavier piercings were generally relegated to the gay leather and fetish communities, punk rockers, and other subcultures.  Keep in mind this was in the very early days of public internet use, so people had to find out about piercings from magazines or from seeing people on the street. Sure, cities like New York, San Francisco, and LA had more prominent subcultures for body piercing, but most other cities had more of a “proto” subculture when it came to body piercing. Even I had trouble getting pierced before then, having many of my piercings done during goth industrial nights at local clubs in the late ‘80s, or at leather parties I had snuck into.

At that time clients were almost all enthusiasts, and were always insanely grateful to have someone to help them get the piercings they wanted. They took aftercare seriously and listened to what you told them to use. There was little worry about conflicting information, because there were few people giving out this information.

Most of us still pierced with clamps. Body jewelry was fairly expensive to purchase wholesale, and it was limited compared to what we can get today. Internal threading below 14 gauge was hard to come by, and there weren’t as many lengths and diameter options.

The first big changes I remember came with two big public media navel piercings. The first was when Rachel from Season 3 of the Real World got her navel pierced on the show. The second was when Alicia Silverstone “got her navel pierced” (it was a stunt navel) in Aerosmith’s “Cryin’” video (by our lovely treasurer Paul King!), both in 1993. This very visible jump into the mainstream media started body piercing’s slow crawl into the limelight we see it in today. I immediately saw a jump in business and a growing interest in body piercing.

It was around this time that I also found usenet newsgroups and the group rec.arts.bodyart. For you young folks, usenet newsgroups were a bare bones way to communicate and interact on the early internet, similar to what Facebook does now, but closer to how reddit works. Rec.arts.bodyart was the first place I found to share and gain information and knowledge about body piercing without having to travel to a convention. Even so, things were pretty limited, and bandwidth was much lower than what we are used to today. There was no easy uploading of photos, very few people could afford digital cameras, and even scanners were still fairly pricey, so it was mostly all text-based posts back and forth. This was also when I found out about the APP, nabbing any of the few newsletters that were available.

In 1994, the first, and what I would consider the most important and influential body art website launched, Body Modification Ezine, or BME, and it was glorious. Now we (both piercers and enthusiasts) had a place at our fingertips that we could submit images and look at what everyone was doing all over the world. No more waiting for quarterly publications like Body Play and PFIQ, or the tiny bit of info you could get from tattoo magazines.

As more and more people gained cheap and easy access to the internet, BME grew. They added live chat functionality, a section for clients to share their experiences, a question of the day section, an extreme section for harder modifications, and even an “adult” section for the more saucy side of things. I remember spending hours on BME almost every day, never getting tired of everything there was to see and learn.

By the late ’90s, it was more and more common to have clients bring in print images of things they had seen on BME. This is where the type of clients I’d see started to change. While many were still light piercing enthusiasts, they weren’t the die hard piercees I had become accustomed to seeing. They were much more squeamish and sensitive to the portfolios they flipped through.

It was also at this point that freehand techniques started to spread slowly out into the industry, causing a slight fuss. Many piercers, myself included, were concerned about the safety of these new techniques, having sharps so near your fingers during the procedure. Of course, as time went on, many of us did begin to test and adopt freehand methods, seeing that there were certain benefits to be reaped, both for us and our clients.

As the early ‘00s rolled in, BME introduced a new companion website, IAM.bmezine.com. Modeled after social websites like Livejournal, but meant specifically for those in the body mod community. In many ways, it did things the right way before Myspace and Facebook existed. With the ability to design your own page, post diary entries, create your own forums, and easily upload images (that could also be auto submitted to the main BME website), it became a huge hit within the industry, and with even the lightest of piercing enthusiasts. This was also when I started attending the annual APP conference. It was amazing to have somewhere with so many piercers all in one place, all sharing and learning.

With the mid ‘00s came Myspace and Facebook, followed by Twitter, and the ushering in the of the social media era. As more and more people joined these sites, made connections, posted photos, and shared opinions, the need for a dedicated social website started to slowly dwindle, and less and less people stayed on IAM.

The other thing that rolled in with the mid ’00s was the public eye being drawn to some of the heavier things some piercers were doing, and posting for public consumption. Several piercers got themselves into some trouble here and there because of it, so many of us started to be more conservative with what we offered at our studios.

It was also in the mid ‘00s that I noticed clientele had drastically begun to change. A good portion of clients had no interest in piercing as a whole. They instead just wanted the latest accessory. While studios had always been a retail business, this pushed piercing studios into a more retail mindset, having to really consider the full customer experience and customer service became a greater focus than it had ever been. What once had been risqué for many was now chic, and many clients wanted that chic boutique experience. With the proliferation of smartphones, clients also began to have immediate and constant access to the internet wherever they went. This brought up companies like Yelp in the mid to late ‘00s, where anyone could review anything, making the customer experience one of the most important things. This didn’t just go for in-shop interactions, but also for any online interactions, and even personal blogs and webpages being scrutinized by potential clients. This caused more and more of us to realizing that once something is on the internet, it never really disappears.

It was also in this timeframe that freehand techniques began to become more standard and accepted techniques as previously. This is partially due in turn due to the internet as well, especially with how easy it was to get information and interact with other piercers. As this information spread, more and more of us started to ditch piercing clamps, with some taking strong stands that one was better than the other (when the truth is all that matters is that the client gets a clean, safe, and properly placed piercing). It did lead to many (in my opinion) fun and amusing debates amongst us. The annual APP Conference & Exposition also had grown exponentially, with more piercers wanting to test the waters and experience what had made so many of us fall in love with that one week a year.

As the late ‘00s and early ‘10s rolled in, Facebook, Twitter, and even newer internet based  technologies like Instagram and Pinterest had all become household names. Clients could instantly save a photo they saw to their phones and bring it in. Piercers could immediately share their work and have hundreds if not thousands of people liking, tagging or repinning these images in a matter of minutes to hours. This is what still amazes me sometimes; how quickly and easily information can spread, both good and bad. This also lead to the pseudo-death of BME and IAM. While many still visit the site, and even still have IAM accounts, Facebook with its ease of connection–one place where you can chat, blog, and share all aspects of your life and lifestyle–now exists and IAM and BME have suffered because of this. Similar to how small businesses have been hurt by big box stores.

And that, my babies, is the end of my recount of how I’ve seen our industry, clientele, and the interaction of the two change over the years. Hopefully you have not only learned that I am old as dirt, but that these changes have made for some interesting and great things happening to our industry and organization.