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Eyebrow Piercing Dangers
Cleaning Eyebrow Piercings
Caring for Eyebrow Piercings
Nose Piercing Pros & Cons
Healing Nose Piercings
Cleaning Nose Piercings
Concealable Nose Rings
Piercing Over Scar Tissue
Healing Infected Belly Button Piercings
Healing Infected Tongue Piercings
What Piercings Hurt the Most?
Why Do Piercings Close Up?
Summary: Care for an eyebrow piercing by not touching it, cleaning it twice a day with antibacterial soap and soaking it in an Epsom salt bath once a day. Find out how to avoid rejection of an eyebrow piercing with this free video from an experienced piercer on body modifications.
Kerri Naslund has been piercing at Zebra in San Francisco, Calif. since 1993. She has perfected her piercing skills with what was thought of back then as a high average of 15 to 20...read more
"Hi, I'm Kerri at Zebra in Berkeley, and I'm here to tell you how to take care of an eyebrow piercing. One thing that you're going to want to make sure to do is not irritate your eyebrow piercing too much because it has a very high rate of rejection. It's very easy to irritate your eyebrow piercing. Too much touch or fiddling could make it reject. Sometimes even sleeping on it wrong will irritate it and cause it to become infected or, again, reject. You're going to want to take care of your eyebrow piercing by cleaning it every day, twice a day, with some kind of antibacterial solution or benzalkonium chloride. You're going to want to use a brand-new, fresh, clean Q-tip, put the solution or antibacterial soap on one side. You're going to want to make sure that it gets all around the top and the bottom of the piercing. You can move it around to make sure that it gets a little bit inside. After the antibacterial or the benzalkonium chloride goes on, you're going to want to wash the dead bacteria off. You can use the other side of the Q-tip for that, or a brand-new Q-tip, or you can simply just splash it off with clean water. You're also going to want to soak once a day for 15 minutes with a little cup of warm salt water. Fill your little cup with one pinch of salt -- Epsom salt or sea salt, not table salt. Table salt contains iodine -- it's an irritant. With warm water, you can use tap water or you can use distilled water. Distilled water is better, but tap works just fine. Fill your cup, stick your eyebrow in, give it a little bath. Do that once a day for 15 minutes. You're going to want to continue that regime for 6 to 8 weeks in order to get your piercing healed. That's how you take care of it."
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Comments
jefchoice said
on 12/15/2008 Every aspect of this aftercare is dated.
Antibacterial soap is not intended for use on wounds like eyebrow piercing. That is why all antibacterial soap has a warning that says "For External Use Only".
Benzalkonium Chloride (BZK) is another "For External use only" product. The most common form of BZK that consumers are familiar with is in Bactine. There website specifically recommends against the use of Bactine on a body piercing. http://www.bactine.com/bactinefaq.htm
Epsom salt and sea salt are TOTALLY different products. Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate. Sea salt is sodium chloride. Implying that they are interchangeable is irresponsible and inaccurate. Either way, whenever you mix these products, they are not going to be accurately mixed, pH balanced or sterile.
Wound wash saline will be sterile and isotonic (though still not pH balanced) and is considered the up to date method for cleaning all piercings.
By the way, 50 piercings a day is one piercing every 9 and a half minutes for 8 hours without a break. 100 piercings a day is 1 piercing every FOUR minutes for 8 hours.
gladysphilips said
on 12/16/2008 Unless you're including play piercing, I find it extremely hard to believe that 100 piercings could be done in one day if the antiseptic is allowed the proper drying time. Skin prep alone would take the entire 4 minutes.
The fact that this piercer doesn't understand the difference between epsom salt and sea salt is disturbing, and suggests that she also doesn't understand what salt itself is. This kind of ignorance in the industry is preventing piercers from being taken seriously by the medical community that they try so hard to emulate. You cannot expect to logically and safely recommend an aftercare product if you do not first understand what it is.
BZK is also completely inadequate aftercare. i would encourage this piercer to visit pubmed.com and search for BZK. BZK can be easily contaminated with gram negative bacteria such as pseudomonas, and contaminated BZK has been implicated in multiple infections that required hospitalization.