Healing Infected Belly Button Piercings

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Kerri at Zebra in Berkeley, and I'm here to talk about treating an infected belly button piercing. If your belly button is infected, the first thing you're going to want to do is go seek the advice from a professional piercer. Sometimes your piercing isn't infected at all -- it's just showing signs of irritation and/or allergic reaction. Those two areas can be treated very easily by changing the way you're cleaning your piercing or changing the jewelry. If your piercer decides that the piercing really, truly is showing signs of infection, you're going to want to go see your doctor so he can prescribe some antibiotics. Until then, you're definitely going to want to soak your navel for 10 to 15 minutes once a day with warm salt water. The way you do that is you take a small cup, warm water, one pinch -- small pinch -- of Epsom salt or sea salt. Do not use regular table salt -- it has iodine in it and it will irritate. You're going to take that cup, bend over it, cup it to you. It'll create a suction, and you'll just hold it on there, 10 to 15 minutes once a day. That's going to help start pulling the puss out, loosening the crust. It's going to get some of the bad bacteria out of there. You can also, and I say this with a lot of caution, use a minimal amount of a triple antibiotic ointment two to three times a day."