A piercing parlor is a very misunderstood thing to a large portion of the population, partly because the industry is changing in ways that even those involved could not have imagined in the past.
On the out – the smoky back alley tattoo parlor, filled with dirty needles and bikers drinking Jack Daniels and popping Quaaludes.
On the rise – the professional studio, savvy businesses with friendly staff, clean offices and a desire to bring an air of respectability to a field to which cultural prejudice has not been kind in the past.
These differences can be seen with a visit to many of the Columbus studios, where the old stereotypes are being replaced by apprenticed professionals complete with portfolios and business cards. Many piercing studios – such as Stained Skin, Piercology and Evolved, all in the Columbus area – resemble Fortune 500 franchises more than the smoky dive bars with which they have been historically associated, becoming a more mainstream business community.
Though no sufficient, standardized training program exists for the piercing community, the best piercers adhere to a fairly strict system of apprenticeships and education.
“I took a couple of apprenticeships, which resulted in a lot of bad habits. It’s all about the money to some people. But mainly everything I learned came through BodyWorks in Cleveland. I took a lot of seminars up there. I did a lot of self-research and watching over other people,” said Chris Sherrer, a piercing artist at Stained Skin.
Piercology, easily the most prestigious piercing studio in Columbus, insists on a rigorous three-year apprenticeship program open only to employees that have worked there for at least six months. Through the program, apprentices are taught the intricacies of sterilization, biology and piercing, along with other aspects of the industry.
That it has become an industry at all shows how far body art has come and how much deeper into the mainstream it has delved. And this progress seems to be helping everyone involved.
Piercology owner Pat McCarthy notes that, overall, the practice of piercing is benefiting as its popularity grows and techniques become more refined.
As a past president of the Association of Professional Piercers – an organization formed to educate both piercers and the public about safety issues and new developments in the art – McCarthy has championed piercing as not only a legitimate art form, but as a field that needs to be viewed as a legitimate business as well.
He has spoken at numerous conferences – including some held by the Red Cross and other health institutions – insisting on the need for standards to be implemented for the piercing industry, to ensure the APP motto of “Health, Safety, Education.”
“It comes down to educating the public about which studios to go to, so each studio will be forced to raise their standards,” McCarthy said.
This work has led to much progress, he said.
“Things are changing. I never thought it would be like this,” he said, noting that piercing has still not quite gotten the mainstream acceptance it deserves.
Leading a push that surprisingly has come predominantly from inside the industry rather than from the outside, McCarthy and Dave Vidra, a Cleveland-based piercing artist, are working for laws ensuring that professionalism and safety continue in each shop in the industry.
In the future, as piercing grows even more popular and both the artistic and the scientific aspects of the practice become further advanced, Columbus piercers and many other advocates are hoping that stricter and more broad standardization will follow.
At present, there is no specific license for piercing. The APP cannot license or certify shops because it has not been accredited by any federal department. Thus, studios are only subject to inspections from the same city health inspectors who check restaurants and other small businesses and have limited knowledge of proper piercing procedures.
“Actually, last time the health department was in, we helped teach them what to look for in a shop, especially about sterilization and what should and should not be reused,” Sherrer said.
However, as industry standards take a turn toward the more refined and the market widens to include everyone from teenage girls to their middle-class and middle-aged mothers, what is being done with body art is pushed to greater extremes, as artists include scarification and other over-the-top modifications in both their portfolio and their studios.
Perhaps that correlation is the result of a shift to professionalism in the piercing community. As the network for sharing information grows stronger by the day, as knowledge begins to be shared rather than hoarded, and as scientific techniques are perfected, the industry allows for the envelope to be pushed further than ever.
This is evident with Shawn Lower, a piercing artist and the manager at Evolved. A longtime enthusiast of body art, Lower looks like what the soldiers in Battlefield Earth might have looked like if the movie had been directed by Genghis Khan.
He knows – even enjoys – the way piercings have made him stand out and seems to respect that there is a social price to be paid when one dedicates oneself to a certain art form, and that art form transforms into a lifestyle.
The number of tattoos he has increases fairly regularly, and what he has pierced changes consistently as well, though his ballpark figure remains around an estimated twenty. He, like many local artists, has studied extensively in other cultures, uniting American techniques with forms of body art that have existed for thousands of years attached to rites of passage, tests of strength and tribal membership.
The result seems to be a combination of ancient aesthetics with modern technology, making the practice of piercing safer as well as more creative.
Why piercing is enjoying widespread appeal in the U.S. remains partly a mystery, as most forms of body modification stay completely disconnected with any ritual significance in this country. And even with the more common forms of body art, the line between self-expression and self-mutilation is fine, if not blurred altogether.
In Columbus, the real motives for and appeal of getting pierced seem as varied as the recipients themselves.
“I always thought the tribal-esque aspect was pretty cool, the originality of it,” said Sherrer about his 30-or-so piercings.
For a large section of the pierced population, body art – especially the more common forms of tattooing and piercing – has a much deeper meaning. McCarthy insists piercing can be part of the healing process for many suffering mid-life or adolescent crises. He has pierced women with gold rings melted down after failed marriages in places that may have been deemed unacceptable by ex-husbands.
Many insist their piercings are partly rebellious statements, a boundary-breaking anti-aesthetic allowing many to set themselves apart from others by sporting unconventional forms of body art.
But the broader aspects of self-expressive artistic value still seem to lie at the heart of body modification.
“Our generation has always been influenced by art,” said Giovanni, a tattoo artist at Stained Skin. “A lot of tattooing and piercing now has brought a lot of artists to the foreground. Since you can’t make money doing visual art anymore, body art has become an outlet for a lot more real creative artists.”
