Ear Piercings have gained immense popularity with time and also as the fashion industry evolved. Nowadays, many youths consider doing ear piercing in hope that it might improve and bring out their personality and add more colours and fun aspects to their personality.
Ear piercing is quite a hectic and delicate task to do, and if done in the wrong way, consequences are needed to face by an individual who gets the ear piercing done in the first place.
You might have heard of all the cool stuff about ear piercings and how stylish they might look, but you also need to pay attention to the other side of the coin and the details of the post effects of the ear piercings.
Table of Contents
What is exactly ear piercings?
The practice of ear piercing mainly means penetrating the part of your ear with the help of equipment or tool or a needle. Later, the piercer may place the jewelry in that penetrated area. Like Spider Bites Piercing, Septum Piercing and Shen Men Piercing it is also demanding to the young generations.
Signs of infected ear piercing:
We might all feel an urge to try ear piercing once in a lifetime, but along with it might come to some uninvited problems and effects that you might not like.
Basically, you will start noticing the signs of infected ear piercing after two days of getting your ear piercing done or some even notice after more than 2 days of ear piercing. The after or post effects you might experience could be mild or hazardous, varying from person to person. In extreme cases, your body is also likely to experience cold and fever.
But, some of the symptoms and signs you can experience are:
- Swelling
- Tenderness of the area
- Infection
- Pain
- Skin irritation
- Itching
- Burning
- Swollen lymph nodes
- Pus drainage
- Abscess
- Crusting
- Embedded earrings
- Headache (in rare cases)
- Allergic reaction
Some of the effects won’t need immediate attention from the doctor, but a few of them might need.
Check out the Red Veins on Eyelids: Most Popular Causes, Prevention and more
How to identify a qualified piercer?
Apart from how much you are excited about getting the ear piercings done, you must always make sure that you are getting the piercing done by a qualified piercer. It is essential to make sure that you are getting the treatment done through a legit piercer as they might take a professional approach to get the piercing done and on the other hand, might have some soothing ways to calm your pain.
Things to look for when identifying piercer:
- Make sure the piercer is certified and licensed
- Make sure they are specialized in the field of ear piercings
- Look out for testimonials or reviews of the previous clients
Causes of infected ear piercing:
There could be numerous ways through which you can get infected ear piercing. But today let’s get to know the common causes of infected ear piercing:
- Lack of maintenance of hygiene around earlobes and cartilage.
- Touching your earrings with stained or greasy hands.
- Removing the earring from the area until it is healed. (It generally takes upto 6 weeks to get the area healed)
- The earrings back might have a tight grip surrounding the area of the earlobe which can block the blood flow surrounding that area.
- Piercing the ears with infected or non-sanitized tools and equipment.
The ideal age for getting the piercing done:
There might be contradictions in each one’s opinion but to get a vague idea, one can get their ears pierced after the age of 9 as the children below the age of 9 are more likely to touch their ears incessantly and repetitively which can lead to infected ear piercing.
How to treat Infected ear piercing at home?
To some extent, one can treat minor infected ear piercing at home but even if when you have tried multiple options and nothing seems to work then you must seek a doctor without having any second thought.
The most common method to solve this problem at home is to clean the surrounding area of the ear piercings and with the saltwater solution three times daily. Let’s hear how you can treat the infected ear piercing at home:
- Sanitize and clean your hands with the help of any disinfectant or hand wash.
- Take a bowl with 1 cup of clean water.
- Add ½ teaspoon of salt to it.
- Dissolve and let it stir.
- Dip the cotton ball in the mixture.
- Now tap the cotton ball on the area which is infected.
- Let it dry with the help of tissue.
- Later you can apply an antibiotic cream.
Repeat this process at least twice a day and keep doing it for 3-4 days, and if it still doesn’t work then it’s time that you must seek professional help from a doctor.
Generally, you won’t feel any need to ask a doctor if you are dealing with any trivial matter, but don’t waste any time if you feel that it could be sort of any major issue. The major issues involve symptoms such as an individual can experience.
- Cold
- Fever
- Swelling
- Redness
- Headache (if lasted for more than 48 hours)
How to prevent infected ear piercing?
Treating infected ear piercing can be quite painful and at the same time be tiresome for most of the people, but you don’t have to go through so much of pain if you just look up for options in preventing infections at the first place.
Some of the ways you can opt for preventing the infection are:
- Go for professional and specialized ear piercer instead of going for any local ear piercer or worse doing it at home by yourself.
- After you have got your ears pierced, make sure to clean your earlobes/cartilage twice or thrice a day with the help of water and salt solution.
- Avoid incessantly touching around the area of the ear piercing.
- Make sure to ask your piercer to use sanitized earrings and tools and equipment.
- Make sure that your earrings do not end up getting caught in any of the clothes.
Should we consider removing ear piercing?
When you have freshly pierced ears and the wound is new, it is best recommended not to remove the ear piercing as the fresh wounds are most likely to heal and it will result in closing the pierced area. Eventually, this can lead you to get the ear piercing done twice.
Another reason to not remove the earrings is that the wound can get shut inside the area resulting in suppressing the infection.
You may also like Christina Piercing
When to seek doctor?
Normally, you can treat your infected ear piercings at home itself, but sometimes the problems could get exaggerated and could not be solved at home, then you definitely need to seek some professional help from your doctor.
Under the below mentioned circumstances, you should call out for medical help:
- If your earring is embedded in the earlobe or cartilage of your skin.
- If your body develops fever.
- If your body develops cold.
- Redness and infection surrounding the area of the ear piercing.
- In case, there is no improvement within 2 days of ear piercing.
Conclusion:
While looking at the ear piercings of your friends or the people you might know, it may seem too exciting but there could be much more to the back-end story. In reality, ear piercings are painful and need to be taken proper care.
As much fun it may sound to get the piercing done in the first place, but you also need to take proper precautions to prevent all the pain it could cause you after getting those piercings done. I hope by far, I have delivered some value to the time you spent reading this article and you might take some preventive measures as mentioned above.
