Cleaning Nose Piercings

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Kerri at Zebra in Berkeley, and I'm here to tell you how to clean your nose piercing. It's especially important to make sure that you keep up with the cleaning of your nose piercing because it's very, very hard to heal and very easily infected and irritated. The first thing that you're going to want to do is make sure that you clean your hands with antibacterial soap and water. Your hands are the dirtiest part of your body, and you don't want to introduce any foreign bacteria to your healing piercing. You're going to want to use an antibacterial solution or soap. We use benzalkonium chloride. You're going to want to put the solution or the soap on a brand-new, clean Q-tip. You're going to want to clean the outside of your nose as well as the inside of your nose, all around the piercing. You can even move it up and down a little bit. Not too much -- you don't want to irritate it by moving it too much, but you're going to want to get the solution all in there. Once the solution's been sitting for 30 seconds, you're going to want to wash it off. You can use another Q-tip and plain water to get that off, or you can splash it off. Once a day, you're going to want to soak your piercing for 15 minutes. This is the most important part of cleaning the nose piercing. The way you're going to want to do this is a little cup of warm water, one pinch of sea salt or Epsom salt. Do not use regular table salt. Regular table salt has iodine in it, and that will irritate your nose piercing. You'll be very sad. One pinch of the salt in the warm water, mix it up, stick your nose in there, get on the cell phone, let it soak, 15 minutes. Watch your favorite television show, do whatever it's going to take to make sure that you do soak your nose for 15 minutes every day. Seriously, the most important part. An ugly nose piercing is the worst."