I have a lot of holes in me and I have made basically every aftercare mistake at least once. The good news is that aftercare is genuinely simple — the problem is that most of what people do is too much, not too little.
The healing times you were given are minimums
Lobes are the fast ones, six to eight weeks. Nostril is more like four to six months. Cartilage — helix, conch, tragus, rook — is realistically six months to a year, and an industrial can take longer than that and be difficult the whole way. Navels are frequently a year.
The number your piercer gave you is the earliest it could possibly be fine, not the average. Treating the minimum as the expected date is why so many people end up with an irritated piercing in month three.
Sterile saline. Nothing else.
Sterile saline wound wash, twice a day, and that's the entire routine. That's not me simplifying for a blog post — that is genuinely it.
What to keep away from it: alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, tea tree oil, antibacterial ointment, and those aftercare solutions sold next to the piercing gun in the mall. All of them either kill the new tissue you're trying to grow or trap moisture against it. Every one of those made a piercing of mine worse before I learned.
Stop touching it, and stop turning it
Turning the jewellery is old advice that got passed down forever and it's wrong. It drags crust and bacteria through the channel and re-injures tissue that's trying to close around the bar.
Don't touch it with unwashed hands, don't let anyone else touch it, don't sleep on it. A travel pillow with your ear in the hole is the single best thing you can buy for a healing cartilage piercing, and it looks ridiculous and it works.
The bump is usually irritation, not a keloid
Almost every bump people panic about is an irritation bump, and irritation bumps come from pressure — sleeping on it, a bag strap, jewellery that's too tight, or a piece changed too early. Remove the cause and it goes down.
True keloids are genuinely rare and they don't behave like that. Before you buy anything to treat a bump, work out what's pressing on it, because nine times in ten that's the whole story.
Don't change the jewellery early
This is the mistake I made most. You hit the earliest date, you swap it for the pretty one, and a week later it's swollen and weeping again.
Wait longer than you want to, and get the first change done by your piercer rather than doing it yourself over a sink. And if something does go wrong, go back to them — they'd much rather see it early than see it in three months.
Saline, patience, and keeping your hands off it. That's the whole thing. Almost every piercing problem I've had came from doing more rather than less.
Close-ups of all of them are on my page.
VIP Access