Today marks a special day here at Rogue. It’s Gemmas birthday! It’s also over a year since this legend joined the team here at Rogue, so we thought we’d take the time to look back at everything she has been able to achieve in such a short space of time.
Rogue wouldn’t be the same without her.
The Beginnings
Gemma joined Rogue on January 4th, 2021. Having been coming to get pierced by us for a while at that point, we could see it was her dream to take control of her career and join the team. Gemma had been piercing for a long time at another studio, but felt that she needed to move forward to a more experienced, high quality UKAPP member studio to really further her skills. So we took a small financial gamble and she became a Rogue!
Gemma’s first ever piercing at Rogue was this perfect septum piercing. No pressure!
From the first time we met Gemma, we could see her passion for piercing was so great. She had been doing a huge amount of online learning, absorbing everything she could from piercers choosing to share their knowledge. It was an honour on our part to be able to give her the space to spread her wings. It wasn’t long before she was flying!
Gemma’s first piece of BVLA! The ‘Afghan’ in this fresh helix piercing.
Gemma – Historian and Journalist Extraordinaire.
What we didn’t expect was Gemma’s true passion for history, and preserving the thoughts and stories of piercing in the UK. Whilst the USA has the Piercing Archive, there truly isn’t a huge amount of piercing history being preserved in the UK. Gemma has really taken to this challenge with her whole heart, and began the now extensive ‘Piercer Interview‘ series on our blog! Every time she has the opportunity, she loves to sit down with other piercers (some of whom have been seriously overlooked and underestimated!) and recorded their history – Who they are as people, how they came to be in the industry…
Gemma truly has a deep love for the weird and wonderful. As a suspension practicing studio, it’s been amazing to see Gemma take to the sky with her first body suspension only a few weeks ago. It was such a magical, transformative moment. It felt like a new era had begun, and it was an absolute privilege to be able to watch it.
This love for history is now extending into becoming a bit of a local historian for body piercing. Nottingham has a surprisingly long and colourful history with tattoo and piercing. Gemma is now working closely with the Nottingham Archives and Justice Museum to discover, and give context to, some of the piercings and tattoos recorded in their annals.
A little snippet of ‘The Incredible Til’ class, taught by Paul King at UKAPP 2022. History comes to life in these moments.
Piercing Work
Gemma has absolutely blossomed in the last year under the guidance of Aiden and Breo. Moving from cannula piercing to blade needles, clamps to freehand, and moving into the wierd and wonderful world of intimate piercings… Gemma is truly in her element!
Gemma in action…
Paired upper lip piercings with 18k Trihbeads, and healed jestrum.
Jestrum!
Philtrum!
Faux Rook
Gemma has that rare skill of being able to take a step back, take a deep breath, and allow her hands to do exactly what her brain imagines them to do. From super technical work, to move freely creative piercings… Gemma is becoming a truly amazing piercer.
We cannot wait to see where Gemma goes next with her work, both piercing and history. As a committee member for the UKAPP, she is also working with the industry to raise standards and bring the message of high quality to more piercers across the country.
UKAPP Member! Next step, take over the world…
Happy birthday Gemma! Hopefully we get to celebrate many more with you in the years to come. Thank you for becoming the mum of the studio that we didn’t know we needed.
Anyone who is involved in the body modification world will know Olly Todd. Based in Factotum, Norwich, Olly has been involved in the piercing and modification industry for around 15 years and now runs Cognition Body Art Education where he hold seminars to help educate piercers across the world on techniques and safety. Olly also provides both site and industry specific First Aid training courses across the UK. Both Aiden and Anna (Revenant Tattoo) have worked with Olly over the years and it was a pleasure to have him visit Nottingham recently for some training with our team.
Gemma: What did you do before piercing?
Olly: I was a lifeguard and a swimming instructor. Basically, when I hit 16 the options were work at the swimming pool or stack shelves in the supermarket. I went and became a lifeguard because the pay was better
I worked at a couple of leisure pools and was teaching kids and adults to swim. I started getting tattooed at a studio that was close to where I was working and one weekend the studio called me to see if I wanted to come and sit on the desk and answer the phone for a few hours because the receptionist hadn’t turned up. If I did, he said he’d knock a few quid off my tattoo session.
So I jumped at it. And then it happened a couple more times, and eventually the guy just turned around and said, ‘well if you want, I’ll just show you how to pierce.’ By that point, the people at the swimming pool were getting a bit more antsy about how tattooed I was getting. I still had nothing on my arms, it was all on my torso mostly hidden. But yeah, it was becoming pretty much a once a month visit for more ink so I got the whole, “if you continue this way, then you’re not gonna get very far in the leisure industry” conversation a few times.
At this point I was life-guarding, teaching swimming lessons, junior life saving and I was also doing the lifeguard training as well. So I was getting to that point where I was gonna have to put a suit on soon and look presentable in that industry. I’m so glad I didn’t go down that route.
G: Did you have piercings at that time?
O:I didn’t get my first tattoo until I was around 20, so my first piercing was probably just a bit before that. I did not know back then what I know now. I’d been just toying with the idea of getting a piercing for a while because when I went through college and stuff, I always had bright pink hair, and I was always a bit of a punk, I just hadn’t taken that step to get some holes through me basically. But Norwhich has always had a really good punk scene, all the way back. I’m lucky enough now to be good friends with some of the original, like eighties punk lot that were around.
My first piercing was my lobe, like most people. And I did everything you shouldn’t do on the list other than going into a high street chain shop. I got them done at Download Festival in the middle of a field. It was done with a gun, I wasn’t sober and I’m sure the person doing it wasn’t sober. It definitely wasn’t clean for three or five days.
G: Did you have an apprenticeship when you started to pierce?
O: Most of it was kind of watching this guy do one or two of set piercings and then just getting on with it. I had enough friends that would come in and ‘practice’. Largely, I’d say I was more self-taught than anything else. I think anyone that’s been in the industry for like 10, 15 years probably has a similar start. We all, all kind of figured it out as we went along.
G: How did you transition into body modification?
O: I was piercing loads and then I just stumbled across people like Samppa, Steve Haworth, and at that point Mac and a few others. I really liked what they were doing and luckily I got to do some training with Mac over the years and without his help and support, I wouldn’t have progressed the way that I did. So, special thank you to Mac. I went to a few seminars about modification, I did one on skin branding. I loved branding. It’s always gonna be my favorite modification. After I started piercing, I started realising more about myself. So, I don’t get tattooed for any reason other than I don’t feel complete yet. I couldn’t tell you what the picture is at the end, but I just don’t feel complete and I’m working towards that. In my head, the body mod stuff was really appealing because it was a different way to add and alter myself I suppose, until I found what I needed to look or feel like.
I learnt a lot about body modification from speaking with Mac and then people like Iestyn as well. I went down to London for a scarring class with Iestyn and Ron Garza at one point and that was a really interesting day. And then at BMXnet, taking as many classes there as possible.
The first year I was at BMXnet, I was lucky enough to attend a class that Elayne Angel did on genital piercing. That was something else. Being able to take that class and then later on in the day, witness her piercing people as well. It was great.
There’s always the comedy moments at places like that as well, I distinctly remember taking a male genital class with Cristiano teaching and he had someone up on all fours doing a live guiche piercing in front of probably 50 people. I caught up with Cristiano over in Dublin at the Piercer Trade Show last year actually, he didn’t realise I’d been to his BMX class all those years ago.
G: You’ve worked at Factotum for almost 10 years now, tell us how you started.
O: I’d been drinking with Joe regularly for a while because we all kind of lived in the same area and we all hung out at the same pub. Jokingly for ages, he was like, “you should just come and work for me”. And then, it just kind of happened, which I’m very thankful for. Very thankful to him and without him I don’t think we’d be anywhere near where we are now. He made a lot of things very easy. And working for a piercer makes life so much easier. Joe learned to pierce when he was traveling in New Zealand and he came back to England to set up Factotum. And having the fact that Joe was taught with industry standard jewelry, I mean he was already using brands like Industrial Strengths when I was piercing elsewhere in the city. I think he was probably one of the first people to get NeoMetal as well. It’s been really nice to just be able to step up the game and use all these wonderful companies and not really have to worry about it too much.
G: You now teach at international piercing conferences, can you tell us more about that?
O: I do, it’s becoming a bit more of my life now. Weirdly enough, when you think about it, it’s kind of come full circle from when I used to teach people to swim. I think it’s gonna become more all consuming as well. The balance is shifting for me to start teaching rather than piercing,
I think, seeing the variety of courses and classes at BMXnet got me a bit intrigued about teaching because it wasn’t an elite standard of piercer that teaches the classes. It’s anyone that has something valuable to say. And then going to the UKAPP conference as well, back when it was still in Birmingham with Nici, every year she would poke me, like, ‘so when are you teaching something? When are you teaching something?’ And eventually, I gave in.
CBAE provides piercer education and classes
The first class I ever taught was a color theory class at BMXnet. And then that was followed a week later by the same class at the UKAPP conference . So it all started from there.
G: I really loved your bevel theory and septum classes. How do you decide on a subject to address in your classes?
O: So to start with, I looked at the classes that I’d taken from other people. The bevel theory one, for instance, was done in a very specific way because I learn by doing things. I’d taken Brian Skellie’s bevel theory class year after year, just as a refresher. It’s a brilliant class, but it’s very word heavy as opposed to anything practical and that’s not how I can take things in. So I thought I’d try and create something for people that are more like me, I suppose.
And then the other ones I’ve been doing like the septum one and there’s one on tricky ear piercing, I just keep an eye on the piercing forums and if something is constantly coming up and people are asking for tips or struggling with a specific thing then I’ll focus on doing a class or seminar for those. Like septum techniques.
I think it’s important to keep it relevant to what’s going on.
G: You launched Cognition Body Art Education last year, hosting classes, teaching at events and offering First Aid training.
O: We’re doing First Aid courses after both the Piercer Trade Show and the UKAPP conference this year, which is awesome. There’s the Bloodborne Pathogens training which is in its final stages of being accredited. Everything I’ve done for the BBP course is based on the UK Health and Safety Executive. It dawned on me the other day that the annoying thing is, because I wrote it, I’m gonna have to do a different one course anyway for it to count.
But yeah, other than that, I’m excited for The Sharp End magazine coming to fruition, that’s definitely a plus for the industry, having a trade magazine. I’ve not seen what’s going in it yet either. I wanna keep it all as a surprise but, we’ve been really, really surprised with the people in the industry that have got involved. We’ve just been blown away with the support by not just friends but the industry as a whole getting involved.
There’s potentially gonna be a rather large announcement at the Piercer Trade Show in April as well, but that’s all I can say for now.
G: I’m excited for what this year holds for the industry in general. I have positive feelings.
O:. Yeah, definitely. There’s so many people that have got so much going on that’s just making everything better. Like Nathan and the guys doing all the work with the Trade Show and bringing over some amazing speakers. The fact that there’s now 3 events in the UK with the two Trade Shows and the UKAPP conference on top of anything that anyone else puts together.
Olly & Louise on their wedding day, 2022!
Once again, a huge thank you to Olly for his time and his continued hard work in this industry. Be sure to check out Cognition Body Art Education, his seminars and courses are invaluable and we are eternally grateful for all the work Olly (and Louise!) are doing to push our industry forward.
Andre is a body modification artist living in Berlin, Germany. He met Rogue founder Aiden at the Las Vegas APP conference in 2015 and they have been close friends ever since, travelling around Europe and guest at the same studios. Although not his first language, Andre speaks English amazingly and while guesting with us in Nottingham, he took the time to chat with Gemma about his experience as an artist. Andre is a wonderful person, piercer and all round sweetheart. We were very privileged to spend time with Andre this year, both at the studio and at the UKAPP conference in Manchester this year. You can find him on Instagram at @andrenalinbodyart
G: What was your first experience with piercing or body modification?
Andre: My first not professional experience with body piercing was in the late nineties, I would say 1999 when I got my eyebrow pierced, because that’s what we did. I think it might have been even the same year, I saw the music video for Fire Starter, The Prodigy. And that was the first time that something clicked in my head and I got my tongue pierced. I still say that The Prodigy did a very big thing of bringing me into body piercing. I’ve always wanted to be a body piercer, even in my first apprenticeship where I was a caretaker for disabled children. Whenever somebody asked me, what I was gonna do after the apprenticeship, I would always say that I’m gonna be a body piercer. I started to harass the body piercer that would do all my piercings to please gimme an apprenticeship.
Andre in Mexico , 2019
When my apprenticeship as a caretaker was over and I took on a job where I was working in a school for disabled children, my workday ended at 2:00 PM so I went back to the studio and told her like, “Hey, I’m not joking, I really want to become a body piercer. I have a job, you don’t have to pay me, you just have to teach me.” And then she said “you’ve been annoying me now for two years or even longer and at some point I’m gonna need somebody.” So she gave me the chance and that was that was in the beginning of 2010.
G: Whereabouts did you grow up in Germany?
A: I’m from a small town called Schwäbisch Hall in South Germany. Like 40,000 people lived there and I lived there until around 2012. I would say for the size of the town, we have a very big alternative and left wing scene. There’s a sort of organised club which opened in 1966 and has been open ever since. Self organised. There was a small, independent cinema and we have an alternative radio station. So there is a lot of, I would say, punk rock stuff going on. I wouldn’t say that there was a particular piercing scene, but if you take the circle of piercing scene and punk rock, it is quite a big overlap. So that studio where I first worked was going really well. There was a lot of work to do, which gave me the chance to get a lot of experience within a really short time. We were super busy and also now when I go back there sometimes to do body modification guest spots, I’m surprised every time how many people are interested even in those small towns.
G: Was your journey into body modification a natural progression from piercing or did they happen simultaneously?
A: In the beginning, I was only interested in body piercing. But I always had a very big interest in medical procedures and I think if I wouldn’t have been that lazy in school, maybe I would be a surgeon today. I find cosmetic surgery especially interesting. When people in my small village got their nose done, some people would judge them and I would always be like “how did that work?” So, it came shortly after I started piercing, when I started doing research in magazines and online. There is a magazine in Germany called Expand. It was really cool because it’s the only magazine I’m aware of that was in the German language and was covering all sides of body modification. Piercing, tattoo, heavier body mods, performance art, suspension. And it was really nicely written. I think there was like 12 or 13 issues. BMEzine made me really curious about body modification as well. When the topic of body modification comes up, someone will always mention BME because it brought us all together. I wasn’t a part of the BME community, I have to say, I was just looking, reading and being fascinated, but I didn’t really talk to many people on there. Then when I dug deeper into the body mod world, I found copies of the book Mod Con: The Secret World of Extreme Body Modification by Shannon Larratt and it opened my eyes to a whole new world of body modification.
And then I think it must have been 2010 we went on a tattoo convention in Berlin and I had a seminar about Introduction to Body Modification by Lukas Zpira. Pretty quickly during that seminar of him, I realized I am not ready for that. Before attending, I thought “hey I’m a body modification artist now.” And he actually showed me like, no, you’re not. And I’m still thankful that I left that seminar with that knowledge that I am definitely not ready to offer body mods like implants, at that time. It’s a whole different game to piercing. And I’m very thankful that Lukas was very open. He didn’t promote it. He gave really good information and I had the same experience the year after at BMXnet. I had a scarification seminar with Ron Garza, one of my big heroes in the piercing and scarification world. And I had the same feeling, I wanted to do scarification. And after that seminar, I knew, okay no you are not ready. You have to increase your knowledge about hygiene and wound healing. Nowadays I offer both procedures. I started years after when I finally felt safe and found a mentor.
Hand implant performed by Andre.
G: Did you have any body modifications when you started learning to perform them?
A: I had tattoos and piercings before for sure. I think in like 2003 I did a small branding on my own hand, which faded because it was too shallow. In 2012 I moved to Berlin and in 2013 I started to work at Naked Steel. Naked Steel at that time was a dedicated body piercing Studio. So we didn’t have any tattoo artists and it was one of the top addresses in Germany for heavier body modifications. I’m not sure how much they do nowadays, but in those days, that was the studio to go to. I started assisting on several kinds of body modifications. I was actually assisting on implants procedures before I got my implants on my hand. I was assisting on scarifications before I got my own, so I think I learned about body mods before any.
G: What was the first scarification you had done?
Andre’s original logo, peeled onto his chest
A: It was a skin peeling on my chest. It’s my logo, well a version of my logo. We changed it to a needle blade, back in the day as it was a cannula needle. It’s an anarchy sign made from a circular barbell, a barbell, a scalpel blade, and a needle. I had that logo way before I was planning on opening a studio or becoming a traveling artist, but that logo was in my head for a really long time and that was the first scarification I got on my chest.
G: Was your experience learning to perform body modifications, in terms of scarification and implants, similar to your apprentiship as a piercer?
A: Well I have to be honest, my piercing apprenticeship was different. I grabbed the needle before I knew the theory. Back in those days I was happy that I could do piercings really fast. I didn’t have to wait months or even years until I could do piercings. When I look back at it now, I would do it different. But with body modification, I did it the proper way. I learned about the do’s and dont’s before I started doing it. At Naked Steel we did many ear reconstructions, making lobes larger or smaller. We would do like cartilage punches, tongue splits. I did magnet implants, which was also the first procedure I ever did on my own. My first one is not there anymore, it rejected really quick. It was my best friend and he knew that this was my first procedure. I put in a second magnet in the same finger after the first came out and that is still in there today. Must be like 9 or 10 years ago now. We didn’t do any ear pointing because I think ear pointing is a top of the art procedure. I’m only aware of one artist in the world that I would trust to point my ears, and that’s also the only person I would recommend clients to and that’s Samppa von Cyborg. Most other ear pointings I see either I don’t like the aesthetic of it, or you mainly see ones where there’s so much tension on the ear that I’m doubting that they will heal nice. Samppa’s work is very impressive. He would come to Naked Steel back in the day, like once a year he would guest with us. I didn’t learn from Samppa, but still he helped me a lot during my career. Especially in the first years because when We met in person, I knew I could ask him all the questions and he would always take time to answer it. So he didn’t teach me, but he was a big supporter to me.
G: Your hand implants are awesome, and your coin slot too! What other modifications do you have and how has that changed over the years?
A: To be honest, I’m scared of getting a piercing. I freak out on a regular basis when I get pierced. And I have the same with all kinds of body modifications. So if somebody would’ve told me 15 years ago that I was going to have implants on my hand, I would definitely not have believed that person. For me, curiosity kills the cat, and for me it was the deeper I got into a topic, reading about it, talking with people and seeing the procedure, the less scared I became. So I got a magnet implant and scarification pretty early on, then I got the implants in my hands. I have a huge question mark and exclamation mark on my hands. I dunno why, but I wanted to get them tattooed for a really long time. And when I then saw that silicon implants were an option, I decided to get them as implants.
Any modifications that I offer to clients, I usually try to get them done first on myself. It’s important to know what I’m actually doing to those people and to have the theory knowledge as well as the practical experience on how things feel, how things heal. The coin slot is pretty much the last thing I got done. I had it done, but I had genuine keloid, not an irritation bump, a keloid that I had to have removed about one and a half years after I got the coin slot. I think that must be like 4 years old by now. And since then, I had a couple suspensions but haven’t had much more modifications done.
Andre receiving a tongue split, 2015
G: How was suspension for you? What was that experience like?
A: I always struggled to explain how it is for me. Everybody will have different experience of it. I can only talk about my experience and for me, I have some issues focusing on things, especially focusing on myself and on things that are important to me. I always forget to take care of me. And body suspension, I would always say for me, it’s like a reset button. During the suspension, everything is on mute. It’s just about me. Having a suspension usually feels like restarting the system. And I have to say I love the adrenaline, the serotonin that you get afterwards. After my first suspension, I was totally high for another 24 hours , in a very good way. It was Easter Friday, when Jesus got pierced, me and my best friend in that time had our first suspension and I had to work the day after. I just remember it being one of the best days I’ve ever had at work. I was so cantered. I was just super happy. And I remember that in the evening I had the last client of the day and my co-workers were already finished sitting in front of the studio, having a cigarette, having a beer and I went out just like smiling and said “Wow! That was such an amazing day!” And I will never forget the faces of my ex-boss and my co-worker. They were looking at me and like, are you kidding us? So they obviously had like a really stressful day, but for me there was no stress at all. It really balances me but I have had some suspensions and times where I didn’t feel good. That’s where that idea of my reset button comes from. When my feet hit the ground again, it always feels like, “okay, I’ll start over again and get my shit together”. I think I’ve done 5 or 6 suspensions in my life and all of them were just two hooks in the back, the so-called “suicide suspension” position. I keep thinking about trying something else, but that position gives me so much so I know that it’s very good for me. When I’m suspended I like to swing around and jump around and be like a little kid on hooks. And so the two points in the back just gives me all the freedom to move and jump.
Suspending with the Gorilla Glass team in Oaxaca, Mexico 2019
G: Germany has a bit of a global reputation for having quite a hardcore kink and fetish scene, do you see that expressed in body mods?
A: I would not necessarily say in body modes, but we can definitely see that in genital piercings. I was working in a studio in Berlin. And that area is a very rainbow pride, very open, very kinky area. And we could see that reflected in our clients. Heavy genital piercing projects are not very common, but it’s definitely around. So I would not say no to that question, but I don’t get to see heavy like Mod Con style genital work. Which is probably out there, but I think especially those people that have that experience with their own body, they’re so very often not so outgoing about it. You might see an old guy wearing a proper business outfit and you never know what body mods they have.
But that’s where body mod comes from. Back when Jim Ward opened the first piercing studio, Gauntlet, it was a different time. It was the seventies and body piercing was not very common. And especially on men, it was even less common. So they would start piercing their nipples and their genitals and you wouldn’t see that if you see pictures of them. And I find that fascinating.
G: The stigma around body modification has started to get better, but we still see the remnants of it. Especially when it comes to men and piercings.
A: It depends on where in the world you are. I was traveling quite a bit the last 15 years and I had really weird conversations about my piercings with people. In Zambia, when I was traveling through East Africa in 2011, I was looking different than today. I didn’t have my hand implants, I had less tattoos, I had still all of my facial piercings. And I got into situations like, “what about you remove your piercings and start becoming a real man”, and then I’d tell them to go fuck themselves. That’s the end of the conversation. But the last few years, I have been working for a very fancy jewellery company, a piercing company and I see that people are way more open towards modified people than like 10 or 15 years ago. And I really like to play with that as well. I really like to show that I can be super professional, that I can be super compassionate and a nice person still looking the way I’m looking and I really enjoy when I’m sitting in a packed underground train in Berlin and I’m the first one to get up if there’s an older person. And I enjoy their faces when when you see that, they just learnt something about making assumptions.
G: Can you tell us more about your travels?
A: What was really impressive to me was when I was traveling to countries where several kinds of body modifications are not a modern thing. Meaning in Germany a hundred years ago, I’m not aware that people would do scarification, for example. But when you travel to countries like Zambia where scarification has been practiced for many thousands of years, it’s really interesting. I tried to get in touch with someone offering scarification or someone who could tell me a little bit more, which I couldn’t manage when I was last in Zambia. It was easier in Tanzania, for example, I met a young boy from the Maasai tribe and he would tell me about stretched ears. He loved that I have my ears stretched. He didn’t have his stretched and we were talking about it and he told me “that’s something my grandmother would do.” And that was cool for me to hear. It’s very different in the western world.
I was traveling to Borneo aswell where tattooing is a really old practice and they would pierce apadravyas for a really, really long time. So that was really interesting getting in conversations with people, learning the history of it. I’ve not travelled too much outside of Europe but I think the piercing and body mod scene, especially the last couple years, it’s getting more together. In Germany, for example, 6, 7, 8 years ago, hygiene was a very big topic. Also with all the different associations, in Germany, in England, Poland, Benelux etc, I think the piercing community is getting closer together.
A: I’m a co-founder and I have to be honest, it wasn’t my idea. I have a very close friend, Loreia from Stuttgart and also my friend Tom who’s not offering piercing anymore and we had a Whatsapp group where we would just have an exchange and talking about piercings. One day, we were thinking that we should start something similar to the Ask A Professional Body Piercer forum on Facebook. Then the idea just became bigger and bigger and we were like, this needs to be more than just a Facebook group, we are starting an association now. That was in 2015. The most important thing with starting the association was bringing back my experience from the APP conference in Las Vegas the year prior. I wanted to help people come together, it doesn’t matter which standards you are working to right now, the only thing that matters is do you want to get better standards? Do you want to become better? And just trying to bring people together and sharing knowledge. In general, it’s not easy to get good information online. There is a shit ton of good information out there, but especially when you’re a newbie, it’s really hard to to know what is good information and what is bad information. And many people wouldn’t know all this information. I don’t blame people for not knowing things. I would blame people for knowing things and still not doing it better. Then we came up with the piercer round tables. So every three months, we would have piercer meetups. We would meet in a random city, or a coffee place and get some piercers in. We usually had like a 20 minute seminar, some topic just to break the ice and then we would have piercing conversations afterwards. Couple years ago, we set up a hygiene seminar for body piercers with Dr. Helge Hanitzsch. It was a five day, seminar and you got a European wide certification so you can prove all over Europe that you learned those things and then you can apply them.
Then Covid hit. During Covid, our board changed. Elected positions were changed. I was vice president for two years, then I was president for two years and I left the board around 2020. I did it for five or six years and sometimes it’s just time to step aside and let somebody else do the job. So at the moment there is not so much happening with the VPP. We’re still getting new members and we’re planning on going back to offering the round table talks. I see many body piercers in Germany growing their standards. So I think maybe in the next year or in two years, there might be a ton of applications.
Many things are changing at the moment. I mean, we all know about the jewellery ordering situation from the US for example. It’s hard, especially when you first ordered high quality jewellery and then maybe the first batch doesn’t sell so quick and that’s scary. A few months ago I started to work as a sales representative for NeoMetal and we opened the warehouse within the EU. So jewellery will be shipped from the Netherlands and it’s gonna be shipping in 2 to 4 days in Europe. I think that can make a huge, huge impact in the European industry because now we have Anatometal, Industrial Strength and now NeoMetal in Europe. I think in 2014, I started to work with NeoMetal, fell in love with that company, with Mark and then John immediately and I’m promoting that company ever since. But now it’s just official. I’m really excited to work and to see like a whole different field in body piercing and to work for a company that I really admire.
G: Whats in the future for Andrenalin Body Arts?
A: At the moment I want to focus on traveling a bit more. Because I love to be working, traveling and hanging out with friends. So whenever I’m in Nottingham, it’s like amazing. I wanna focus a bit on that. But the idea is to open my own little studio in East Germany, towards spring. And finally do it before I’m too old to. I don’t want a huge studio, I want to have a small, nice studio where everybody feels welcome. And I Need a place where I can finally showcase all the artefacts I have collected over the years from the industry. At the moment they’re just in my apartment so it would be nice for people to see my collection.
Once again, big thank you to Andre for his time and for all he has done for our industry over his career so far. A true talent, kind soul and a good friend. We hope to see you soon! – Love, The Rogues x
It’s a Sunday evening after a very busy weekend at Rogue. The weather outside is cold and drizzly but deep in the basement of Rogue, sitting on the floor like goblins, Gemma and Kat have an open and honest discussion about Kat’s journey so far. Kat joined Rogue three years ago and is now the studio manager and jewellery specialist. Growing up in Wales and moving to the big Nottingham city, Kat is now studying for their Master’s degree alongside keeping this Rogue circus going!
Gemma: Tell me about your first experience with piercing.
Baby Kat with minimal piercings! (a Katten…)
Kat: My first experience with piercing was similar to a lot of peoples, it was at a high street shop with a piercing gun. I was 11. My mum took me there because that’s… just where you went. And I had an awful time healing them. My first piercing at a “real” piercing studio was at a place called Nobby’s in Carmarthen, Wales (Should out to Mike, the piercer there at the time!). The piercing room was in the attic of the studio. It was carpeted, had grimy fabric curtains and I was pierced with non-sterile jewellery directly out of a wet autoclave (with no lid!) that was on a wooden table next to the piercing chair. I asked to get my second lobes pierced and they said they’d run out of jewellery! They gave me the address of a local head shop that also sold piercing jewellery, where I went and bought the jewellery that they then put through the ultrasonic and pierced me with. And of course as an indestructable 14 year old, I healed them like a treat.
My next piercing experience really started when I started uni. I went to a local Nottingham studio and I had an okay experience. There wasn’t really any aftercare advice or customer service. After that, I decided I wanted some fancy jewellery and when I went back to that studio, they recommended I visit a gentleman called Aiden, who just opened a shop in Nottingham a couple of weeks previous. So two weeks after Aiden opened Rogue, I walked in the front door and bought my first piece of BVLA.
G: So you started as a client at Rogue before you joined the team?
Absolutely! I would just come in, get a piercing, upgrade some jewellery, have a chat, hang out, ask questions. And I’m guessing Aiden saw something good in me because he invited me to a suspension event he was holding at the studio. It was literally days before Covid hit. The suspension event was my first taste of the real UK (and international) piercing industry. I met a lot of people I’m now really good friends with. That’s where I met Andre! But I was living alone in Nottingham when the first lockdown was looming. The borders had shut, so I couldn’t go home to Wales and Rogue really was my island in the storm. It was the only thing I had left. So I just kept turning up.
As the lockdowns came, we suddenly had an influx of jewellery from the closure of another high-quality piercing studio, most of which was completely unlabelled in tubs and plastic bags, all jumbled together, different sizes and styles. So it was my job to basically be a detective and try and figure out what was what, what brand, what size. Some BVLA, some Anatometal, some Industrial Strength, and a whole lot of labrets! There must have been 600 to 700 individual items that I had to figure out what they were! That took most of the first lockdown. Then we were photographing it, adding to the web store, building the web store from a very small collection to the absolute monster it is now. And that’s where I learnt a lot of my basic jewellery skills. Just having to look at the fine details between an Anatometal clear CZ and a NeoMetal clear CZ, both prongs, both in titanium. Trying to seperare them out by the little difference. And all the various labrets… Labrets were a nightmare.
G: You’re the studio manager and jewellery specialist at Rogue, what do those roles entail?
K: There’s a bit of everything. Staff management, jewellery management, stock control, free therapist… Managing clients, being Aiden’s personal assistant, organising guest artists and flights and hotels and UKAPP membership, writing blogs, organising the social media. In about two and a half years, I’ve helped to grow the Rogue social media accounts from about 1000 to nearly 10,000 followers. It’s been hard work and I think a lot of it has been down to consistency and the quality of the content. I know a lot of studios where it’s quantity, not quality and that means they can really struggle to build the following. But also, the following isn’t that important. It’s the people who walk through the front door that counts.
The vast majority of the people who follow us on Instagram aren’t even in the UK . But I think people can look at our Instagram and get a sense of not just the work that we produce, but who we are as people That is something I’ve always struggled with though, because we do “sell” a lot of ourselves as part of our work. We could put up way bigger boundaries and not get so personal on the social media. But I feel like it’s a personal service and you have to give a little bit of yourself for people to trust you.
G: As the first Associate Member of the UKAPP, I know you get asked this a lot but, why aren’t you a piercer?
K: I feel like piercing is the least interesting part of being in a piercing studio. I feel like although there’s a lot of techniques you can learn and there’s loads of different ways to put that jewellery into someone, you can still have a much wider impact on the industry by running a good business and managing a good studio. And I think actually piercing people would ham up a lot of my time that could be better spent elsewhere. I love talking to people about jewellery, I love working with clients and making the sales. That’s the bit I enjoy.
G: You’ve got a BSc Hons degree in Biology and you’ve recently started your Masters in Microbiology and Immunology. How’s that going?
K: It’s going really well. I feel like I’m a lot more mentally prepared to tackle the workload this time around. I have a lot more self-discipline. I no longer think that getting up at 7AM to go to a 9AM lecture is that hard. I no longer look at 3 hours worth of lectures in one day and think “oh my god, I can’t do this!”
I would consider myself quite a “modified person” and now that I’m studying for my Master’s, I can absolutely see why some people make a choice between pursuing higher education and pursuing their body modification journeys. It’s a difficult topic to talk about, but the fact that I have a 6mm chunk of metal in my face has no bearing on how well I can learn. I would love to see what further education and academia looks like in 20 or 30 years because… the amount of students we pierce? – some of them have to keep ’em in. My academic achievements aren’t recognized by piercers and they aren’t recognized by academics because of my modifications. It’s quite frustrating sometimes.
It’s very difficult, but I do feel like if I was to pursue a career in academia, I would face significant challenges because of the body modification work, the piercings, the tattoos. A huge amount of your funding and your career mobility is down to face-to-face interviews or who you know within academia. And if those people don’t want to know you because you look like a certain way, you are stuck. And that is really annoying. In my master’s degree so far, I’ve felt like I have to work three times as hard as everyone else to prove myself.
Graduating in 2021, BSc Biology (Hons).
G: You taught a class at UKAPP this year about Piercing Wound Healing Dynamics, do you have plans to teach again now that you’re back in education?
K: My class this year went better than I possibly could have expected. I did a lot of public speaking when I was younger during my college years and my first year of uni but because of Covid, I felt like my confidence was knocked quite a bit. But as soon as I got up on that stage and opened my mouth, it was like I’d never stopped! It was so much fun, the engagement was good and I think I pitched it at the right level. I would absolutely love to teach again. I think I will be constantly editing and updating the class to make sure it’s dialled in and accurate to current scientific understanding. But I would love to also teach about infection control and aseptic technique and what an infection actually is and how/why your body’s reacting to it the way it does. I think that would be super interesting.
G: As a very active member in the online piercing industry, have you faced any difficulties because you’re not a piercer yourself?
K: Absolutely, I have. It’s not normally to my face, but I do hear about people discussing my relevancy within the industry and whether my opinion’s actually worth anything. Some piercers think I’m disrupting people who are very comfortable doing things a certain way, because they’ve always done it that way, and they haven’t seen issues from their methods. For example, non sterile gloves for piercing procedures, poor hand hygiene, wearing watches, rings, acrylic nails. I want to ban them! People have issues with that because they don’t see the effects, and they think I’m being pedantic or splitting hairs. But it’s someone’s body. It’s somebody’s health. Being pedantic is kind of the point. And if you’re not being pedantic about hygiene, you shouldn’t be piercing people. If you didn’t know any better, that’s one thing, but if you know better, you should do better.
When I’m trying to educate people, I will always try to come at it like they are trying their best because nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks “I’m gonna mess people up today and I’m not gonna wash my hands while I do it.” Every person out there is doing the best they can with the knowledge and the resources that they have. We are not here to gatekeep information. We’re here to try and make sure everyone’s doing the best they can. If every piercing studio in the UK was working at our level, I wouldn’t be bitter about it. I would be immensely proud, and then look at ways we can go further.
G: You’ve been really vocal about your neurodivergence, how do you balance that with managing Rogue and studying for your Master’s degree?
K: It’s a struggle sometimes. It’s not easy and it’s not always fun. It’s mainly about knowing when to communicate when you’re struggling. Everyone at Rogue is super supportive and everyone here wants everyone else to be doing their best all the time. It’s about knowing your limits. And I’m not good at that, but I’m working on it. I think when I first started, I wanted to prove myself and I wanted to prove that I could do it and that I was worth the money being spent on me. But I was consistently (and without fail) pushing myself to burnout on a weekly basis. Now I’ve been at it a while and I think I’m finally getting to a point where I know my limits. My autism can make communicating difficult and I don’t enjoy talking about things sometimes but it’s definitely worth doing.
G: If you could change anything about the UK piercing industry, what would it be and why?
K: I wish piercers were more open-minded. I feel like if people were more willing to learn and change, the industry would be in a much better position overnight. It doesn’t matter where you’re at. If people were more open minded to actually listening and enacting change, the industry would be light years ahead.
Another thing I’d change, let’s stop this massive push towards everyone being self-employed and running their studios. Not every piercer can possibly be qualified to run their own business successfully. And there is absolutely no shame in admitting that. There’s lots of benefits to being employed! Like sick pay, holiday pay, and you have people to bounce ideas off and learn from. One of the main benefits is you’ve got massive amounts of support. Even if it’s something as tiny as forgetting to open something but you’ve already got sterile gloves on – you can always ask for help and you have that support. And that shit happens all the time. It could be something small as that. It could be something like, ‘I need someone to help me assist on this genital piercing.’ Or something hasn’t gone quite to plan and even if something goes wrong, you have 1 – 4 people around who are all specifically trained in what to do in that moment.
Kat, Jay and their chunky septums.
It also helps with your general learning and your confidence as a person. And because we work as such a dynamic team and we have that support at all times, we can offer piercings to people who other people might feel uncomfortable with. For example, we do a lot of genital piercings at Rogue. Obviously, genital piercing and kink have a huge history. Because we work in a team, there’s multiple people around and you are never alone with that client. The vast, vast majority of clients are just excited about a process that they’ve potentially been looking forward to for 30 years. We’re very privileged to be able to offer a huge amount of intimate work to a huge amount of different people across many, many walks of life for many different reasons. A lot of what we do is because we are super proud of the history of body piercing! You wouldn’t get BVLA, Anatometal, NeoMetal, you wouldn’t get the tiny little gold tri-bead in a nose piercing, you wouldn’t get to pierce a kid’s first lobes at nine – without the hefty kink and genital work of the past. And I feel like if you just focus on one of those things without at least acknowledging the presence of the other, you’re doing the industry a disservice.
And that’s another benefit of working in a team. We have piercers who offer a range of services. Not every piercer will perform every piercing that is available on our menu. It’s just about working with different skill sets and where people excel and playing into their strengths while working to improve their weaknesses.
G: You wear a lot of BVLA, if you could design a piece what would it look like?
K: I honestly think I’d want to design wedding bands and engagement rings over body jewellery. BVLA have got body jewellery down, they know what they’re doing and if you can imagine it, they’ve probably made it already. I really love their classic designs, the ones that are statement pieces but still very mature. ‘Afghans’, ‘trillions’, ‘marquise fans’. Pieces where the gemstones really speak for themselves. If I had to choose though, I’d love to see more work with channel settings because they’re really lovely.
G: A lot of people have full BVLA piercing curations thanks to you and your artistic vision, talk us through the curation process.
K: Honestly, it’s the most fun part of my week every single time. When you book in, it’s about 20 minutes, but it depends on how long you’ve got. If you’ve got an hour and a half to spend talking jewellery, I’ll sit and drink tea and talk jewellery with you for hours.
Talking about jewellery with clients is really personal, we get really into it. Especially with long-term curation projects, you can be in communication with people for a long time, sometimes over a few years and you really get to know those people over that time. Body jewellery is such a personal thing and sometimes you’re designing a curation that someone will wear for the rest of their life. You have to know that person well enough that you can make suggestions about what they would like. The most important thing is communication and being able to get your ideas onto paper and make sure that they know exactly what they’re getting when you translate that into concept into body jewellery and then that jewellery into a reality.
Oftentimes, people are spending thousands on curation and in order to ensure that it is a worthy investment, you have to make sure they’re confident in you every step of the way. There shouldn’t be any doubts in their mind that you are using their money wisely to create a life-long piece of art that they can wear forever.
Email kat@roguepiercing.co.uk to start your curation!
G: What’s in the future for Rogue?
K: Taking over the world, obviously… I feel like me and Aiden are always doing plans and plots. In the next 18 months I’d love to be able to launch a Patreon with piercer educational content. Because, as many people have so kindly pointed out, some of the content that I want to put out into the industry isn’t super relevant to the blog system that we already have. And I feel like, especially with the knowledge that I have and the qualifications I have behind me, and the experience of the studio and the opinions that we wanna share as well… It is worth sharing that on a different platform.
The blog is still gonna keep going and it’s still going to have all of the information that it has on it right now. But I think it would be nice to do a few series of things that are very specific to piercing studio staff and not necessarily information that general clients particularly need or might want. Apart from that, we’re always looking to expand to more piercers. Maybe a new premises, maybe a new city, but that’s a long way in the future and very vague at the minute. We’re working with local jewellers to create custom lines. There’s all sorts in the works.
G: Any advice you want to give to apprentices/front of house/people that are just starting?
K: Number one thing, leave your ego at the door. Especially if you’ re new in the industry, you are gonna make mistakes, you are going to do bad piercings and you are going to embarrass yourself and you need to not have an ego about it. You need to be able to humbly ask people who know more than you questions and take their answers on board without getting shitty about it. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect; the relationship between confidence and competence. So when you know almost nothing, but you know a little bit, you are at the peak of mount stupid and that’s where you think you know everything and you are super confident about it.
Don’t run into this industry, all guns blazing. Be quiet, listen, and then open your mouth. Don’t open your mouth and then start arguing with people. It’s so important to never stop asking questions. Always question why you’re doing things because so much of what you do generally becomes part of a routine. And if you can’t think about why you’re doing things, you’re gonna struggle to improve later on. Learn from your mistakes and if someone points out your mistakes, don’t get defensive.
I also wish more people understood that front-of-house doesn’t just have to be a stepping stone to an apprenticeship. front of house is a career in itself. In America, front-of-house is a recognised, respected career and that is something that we need to definitely bring over here because a good front-of-house can be life or death for studios.
Shout out to David Angels for supporting my nonsense and making sure I was sane enough to present at UKAPP and giving me the confidence that I needed to nail it. And thank you to Aiden for allowing me to continue to exist in this horrifically weird industry in the sense that I do and for supporting me non-stop the whole way. You mean the world to me.
High quality jewellery is integral to the overall, long-term health of your piercing. As much as we love to show the stunning end pieces of jewellery that we get to use at Rogue, the most important part of body jewellery is the quality of the labret post or barbell that you’re using. That’s the piece that goes into your body and it is paramount that your piercer considers the metal, the polish, the length, the gauge and so many other factors to ensure that your piercing is safe.
At Rogue, we use NeoMetal titanium labrets and barbells for all of our threadless body jewellery pieces. NeoMetal has been trading since the early days of body piercing, creating jewellery for Jim Ward at The Gauntlet back in the 1990s. In 1997 the patented threadless jewellery. Innovators from the very beginning, NeoMetal have partnered with both the Body Art Alliance and Association of Professional Piercers, to continue to expand their range of jewellery and make it more accessible for the worldwide industry.
Gemma: NeoMetal revolutionised modern body piercing, how do you keep up with changing needs and standards in the industry?
Lindsey: When we started producing threadless jewellery, it was in partnership with a family owned business that was already ISO compliant. It was already manufacturing medical and dental implant grade titanium pieces, so we’ve been ISO compliant from the beginning. Being the small manufacturer that we were in the early days, we spent a lot of time working really closely with the APP and influential piercers like Brian Skellie, and the the original customers to find out what they want and what the industry needed. And then for the 20 years after that, we had what we call a “good problem” of trying to keep up with the demand for the product. The industry kind of grew and changed around NeoMetal. We started offering different colour gems with different size, different posts and have worked with piercers to guide what new products are needed and what’s trending.
But of course, at the forefront is always the quality and safety. And when we talk about safety, we talk about it in terms of our employees who are working on the machines, the ones who are putting the jewellery together, manufacturing the jewellery. All of that is super important, as well as the safety of the piercers who work with the jewellery and the final wearers of the jewellery. Safety has always been at the forefront of everything we do. We stay ISO compliant and we’re now ISO 9001 certified. We have a team who manages the safety of the employees working with dangerous machines in the manufacturing warehouse, where even a small mistake can can mean someone gets really hurt. Everything we do is about doing it safely.
L: I’ve worked for NeoMetal for a little over a year and a half. I was in a very toxic and unhealthy work situation prior. And I just decided one day, I absolutely can’t do this anymore. So I applied for four jobs. One of them happened to be NeoMetal. I had always been interested in body modification, I got my first tattoo when I was too young to have a tattoo. But I always had jobs where I couldn’t have any modifications on display so I had to strategically place them on my body and keep things hidden
So I was naturally drawn to that alternative world. And it’s really been John Kittell from NeoMetal that’s taken me under his wing, almost like an apprentice. He has he has taught me so much about the jewellery and about how and why we do certain things and don’t do certain things. I’ve learned so much from him in just the short time I’ve been there and I’m so thankful for the time and knowledge that he’s spent and shared with me. It’s been truly amazing.
G: That’s awesome, it’s really important to work with people that you like working with.
L: I love working with people who are so passionate about the jewellery and about making sure it’s perfect. I was recently in California at the manufacturing facility and I got to see their quality control stations. It’s amazing seeing people look at these little, tiny pieces, looking for little imperfections or inconsistencies to make sure and it’s completely safe to use and wear. It’s amazing. They’re making sure there’s no imperfections to the jewellery, no matter how tiny they are, because the amount of bacteria that can be harboured in that tiny imperfection, it is significant.
G: You’ve recently released an 18ct gold range, is this the first time NeoMetal have produced gold?
L: We’ve had a 14 carat line for a while. But with the APP developing their overall standards and their standards for gold, we thought it was an important time to move to 18 carat. It’s in high demand right now. I only wear gold jewellery, I love gold jewellery, I just like how it looks. It’s really on trend right now. And so it’s important for us to stay relevant in that way.
We are definitely working on expanding our gold offering. It’s also really important for us to maintain the NeoMetal brand. There’s a lot of gold manufacturers on the market and they make amazing jewellery and we’re finding a balance of making amazing jewellery but that is still true to NeoMetal in design. We’ve also just launched the semi-precious stone range and that’s also part of our commitment to be bring more trend focused jewellery to the market and just expand what we have available.
G: I really love your new 14ct gold Halloween collection, what’s the process behind creating a body jewellery collection?
L: It’s a bit of a roundtable. We have new project initiatives and I’m involved from the sales side of the team, our marketing team is involved, John is of course involved. And then our operations team is involved because of course, we’ll get these grandiose ideas and then they’ll be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can’t physically do that. So it’s really a group effort and to be perfectly honest, especially with like something like Halloween, it starts with John and a post-it and pencil sketch. It’s thinking of designs that people will like, but also designs that are still NeoMetal. Like the pumpkin spice latte end. We’re kind of like the dork of that industry and it’s embracing that, you know?
We rely a lot on what on what you guys tell us you need and that sometimes comes in the form of less eccentric ends but more necessary products. For example, the length extensions of our labret posts and offering them with different size backs. That aspect of it is equally as important. Is creating longer posts super fun? No, but it is perhaps even more important because it’s something that will be used all the time. It’s integral.
G: No point having a big elaborate end like the D20 without having the right post and base size to support the jewellery.
L: Yes, exactly. So for the fun, limited collections, a lot of those are just brainstorming sessions with all of us as a group and we all decide and then prototypes get made, we look at the prototypes and we say, “okay, this one looks better than this, this will fit better than this.” And we go through that process. We have Steve Joyner on our team and he lends a lot of real experience. He really brings the piercer voice to the table.
L: We’ve done charity work for Ukraine and the devastation there, and for Hurricane Ian and those impacted in Florida. The pride collection in particular was so important to us, and very important to many people on our team. Because of the history of the community in piercing, it was especially important for us that we did it, and we did it right. And that we picked a charity that we felt was honourable.
We made sure that our entire team felt comfortable with the charity that we picked, and that we all felt comfortable with the range that we were offering. We had a lot of meetings about that to make sure that we were as inclusive as possible. It was really a lot of collaboration, a lot of hard work from a lot of people on our team and it came out beautifully. It was a really, really special collection to work on.
G: Tell us about NeoMetal Europe, how’s that going?
L: It’s still very new , but the important thing is making our jewellery accessible. That’s one thing that was ingrained into me when I first started – It doesn’t matter how big the studio is, how many piercers they have, if this is their first time ever buying high quality jewellery – NeoMetal needs to be available to them. The first step is getting it available outside of the US in a way that is easy. Unfortunately, that’s not a big help to those of you in the UK just now.
The NeoMetal Europe Team!
G: Oh! No worries, that’s absolutely not your fault *cries in Brexit*
L: Getting into Europe and making jewellery accessible is step one. With smaller studios who want to use NeoMetal, when you start talking about things like international shipping and import fees, it really does make high quality jewellery, not easily accessible. We want to continue to grow and make our jewellery available to more people. I’m excited to see what impact it will have on the larger industry. This is just the start and I can’t wait to see how it grows. And the the guys we’re working with over there, Andre and Bruno and Simon and David are just amazing. They are all pillars of the piercing community and in their respective communities.
G: Have you seen any differences in the US, UK and Europe markets?
L: A lot of the trends are pretty consistent. Initial piercings in the EU tend to be more 16 gauge and in the US it’s almost always 18 gauge. Which is interesting. And the strange thing is, with nipple jewellery, it’s a bit of the reverse. The smaller gauge barbells and the smaller ends are used in in Europe where 14g is a lot more popular. Whereas here in the States, it’s 12 gauge.
Thank you so much to Lindsey for taking the time to chat with us. And thank you to the whole NeoMetal team for being staples in the modern body piercing world. We look forward to seeing what the future holds!
Based in Plymouth city centre, David owns Angeles Piercing inside Talisman Tattoo. David is one of very few people who left the piercing industry and returned full-throttle, opening up his own studio and becoming a board member of the UKAPP. David is both a UKAPP and APP member and is an incredibly talented piercer . An all round lovely person! Gemma got the chance to catch up with David post-conference to discuss his journey in the industry, UKAPP plans for the future and his sponsorship of Plymouth City Patriots Cheer Squad!
Gemma: What was your first experiencebody piercing?
David: I don’t remember the first piercing I saw. I remember seeing really heavily tattooed people when I was young. There was this guy that used to walk around Dawlish, I remember seeing him when I was really young and being both terrified and fascinated. I was just like, “Mom, look, it’s a bad man and I love him!”
David wears the Mini Olympus by BVLA in his septum
I think the first piercing I ever wanted was my eyebrow because it was the early two thousands and even though it was a super “chavvy” piercing at the time and everyone seemed to hate it , that made me want it. So I went and absolutely begged the woman in the local jewellers (which is a really grandiose term for what this was), it was like a little shack in Newton Abbott market where they sold and repaired watches, and for some reason they had a piercing gun. Thankfully, she did refuse to pierce my eyebrow with that and I got two lobe piercings instead. The school made me take the second one out the next day, and then I started stretching the first one. So that was like my first piercing,
I got my septum piercing pretty early on. I really wanted my lip pierced, that was like my big teenage dream because of MySpace, right? The second I finished secondary school, I ran straight to piercing shop and got my lip pierced. It was the best day.
G: While we’re in the early 2000’s, was there much of an alternative/punk scene where you grew up?
D: Yeah, there was actually. We had a really forward thinking studio called Exeter Body Piercing, which if anyone’s ever heard me talk before, they’ll know how much I love and miss that place. And because of the time, it was still non-sterile gloves and externally threaded jewellery. They were at least using titanium when everyone else was still using cheap, badly polished steel and mystery metal. They sold a lot of large gauge stuff and had all that late nineties, early two thousands crazy piercing photos on the wall. Like intersecting tunnels and stapling and all those practices that we know now very much don’t work, but was super cool to see at the time.
There was actually a reasonably vibrant piercing scene in Exeter, I don’t know about Plymouth because I’d never really spent that much time here as a kid. Exeter, at the time, was a surprisingly punk rock city as well. All the youth culture was divided into one of three groups. And one of those three groups was definitely gonna be the punk kids and the metal kids and they all had piercings, right? It had a reasonable body modification scene back then, for anyone that’s familiar with the UK Body Piercing/Modification scene back when it wasn’t illegal in the UK, Exeter had a fairly well known modification practitioner start their career down here.
D: I can never remember how I encountered BME. I assume it was just like in the back of a magazine or something like that. But I spent every waking moment on BME because, despite the fact there was this be really vibrant scene, I was of course absolutely convinced that I was the one that was gonna do it most extreme, you know, and all this crazy stuff I saw on BME, I was definitely gonna be doing. I’m quite glad I didn’t do that.
G: What year did you get started in piercing?
D: I didn’t start until I was 26. I really wanted to be a piercer but I didn’t really know how to get into it because Exeter Body Piercing had shut down.
Cheaper chain shops started springing up and they couldn’t compete. It wasn’t necessarily just price, it was location as well. Basically, Exeter has a really steep hill and people only walk down it if they absolutely have to because they know they’re gonna have to walk back up. The chain shops just set up further up the hill and no one wanted to walk down to EBP anymore.
So, I was managing a bar and looking for a new job when someone I knew who managed a local studio offered me the opportunity to work there. They’d had two piercers but one just left and the other was going on maternity leave. To be honest, I think they would’ve taken me on at that stage if I was literally on fire. So, they took me on and taught me to pierce, and I mean, it was a low standard shop. I was doing 60, 70 piercings a day by myself, a few minutes for each client, no idea what aseptic or reasonable quality jewellery was. It was titanium because licensing said it had to be. I think I worked there about nine months because I was, not trying to be all ‘holier than thou’ but I was already very well aware that standards were low.
I don’t care what anyone says, piercing is tiring and it’s a big responsibility and it takes a lot out of you to continually hurt someone all day, every day. 60-70 piercings a day. I just couldn’t hack it. I couldn’t do the type of piercing they needed me to do. So I quit and decided to go to university instead.
D: I just needed a project over lockdown and I’ve always really loved Ryan’s podcast, Piercing Wizard. Ryan’s podcast has had lots of British piercers on there, but I was also well aware that there were certain names that were just never gonna make it on that I wanted to talk to. When I started the podcast, I think the only person I had on who had been on Ryan’s podcast before was Charlie LeBeau, because, who doesn’t wanna talk to Charlie, right? I could have done at least another hour of that interview and never got bored. But other than that, I intentionally tried to pick people who haven’t had the opportunity to go on a podcast before.
G: Whatwas your experience guesting at Rogue like?
D: At my first guest spot and on my first day at Rogue as well, I tried to pierce like the shop I was working at rather than just understanding that, actually I’m here so I can pierce how I pierce. Aiden is so very committed to the idea that like you can be any style of piercer and Rogue will have the tools for you. Whereas that’s so different for me at my studio, I just have to make do because I don’t work somewhere that has the possibility of reprocessing. If I can’t make it work with my fingers or a blank, I just can’t make it work, you know? So I think that was the big difference. It was quite nice every now and again to be like, “Ah, that’s really difficult. Wait! I can use haemostats!”. And the Rogue jewellery selection as well makes mine look really small. I’ve never seen that much BVLA before in one place, so yeah, that was exciting.
D: I knew nothing about sports before I got into basketball. We are very much not a sports oriented family. I tried to be into football for a while, just trying to make some friends. Didn’t really work I’m not gonna lie. I’m not very good at faking enthusiasm for football. I’ve done a couple of combat sports, which I quite enjoy, but I can’t do that anymore because if I hurt my hand, I just can’t work. So we’ve never really been a sports oriented family.
But one day my son came home from school and said he wanted to go see some basketball. And we said, alright that sounds horrible but we’ll take you. And we really enjoyed it! Me and me and my wife got right into it. And their cheer squad have really struggled to find sponsorship, which I find baffling because none of the players or the team have had that problem. From a brand psychology point of view, players have good days, but they also have really bad days. But the cheer squad? Only good feelings! So that was like a no brainer to me. We are sponsoring Plymouth City Patriots Cheer Squad this year, which is cool.
G: Tell us about the journey to starting Angeles Piercing
D: I work out of Talisman Tattoo in Plymouth, I rent a room downstairs and my studio is pretty self-contained.
When I left the first studio I worked at, I really did truly intend not to go back to piercing. I thought that place was all there was, and I didn’t wanna find out anything else about the industry. But then a friend of mine who ran a studio, asked if I wanted to work there. I didn’t know if I really wanted to do piercing again but I just agreed to do it for a few months until they found a new piercer. In that time, I had a client come in wanting a set of Dahlia piercings. I’d never done them before and from everything I knew about piercing – it didn’t seem very safe to just ‘give it a go’.
So I reached out to Nick Pinch and asked if he’d show me how to do these piercing if I brought the client along and he agreed. The guy didn’t have the right anatomy for them, but instead, he ended up buying an Industrial Strength prium and a big amethyst cabochon. And I was blown away. I’d never seen jewellery like that before. Pinchy showed me his Statim and stuff like that and I was like, “Oh my god, these things are all incredible.” So a combination of speaking with Rae from Ethereal Aesthetics, Ian from Holdfast Body and Pinchy convinced me to go to the UKAPP conference that year. And I came back from with all these incredible ideas and properly got fired from the studio I was at.
So I went home and I was really, really broken and full credit to my wife because I don’t know that I’d still be piercing now if it wasn’t for her. She was like “look, if you want to carry on piercing then you’ve got basically everything you need except the Statim. So let’s find the money for the Statim and you can have some feelings about this horrible thing later, but right now let’s just find you another job”. We went into Plymouth city centre and I got offers from a couple of studios that I wasn’t really sure about.
Steph and David at their wedding
And then I walked into Talisman. I knew I needed to work there. The aesthetic was just so pretty and it was just such a peaceful space. The studio owners asked me to come in for a chat and I’d already had such a good feeling about it that I’d actually turned down the other two offers. I was so prepared to work at Talisman . I thought I was being interviewed so I wore a fucking suit to meet them. Took a whole bag of like jewellery with me that I’d picked up from conference that I wanted to show them. And they were just lovely. I told them that I wanted to be a UKAPP member and an APP member and they asked what I needed to do that. Looking at the space, it just needed a sink and the ability to make the desk non-porous. The studio owners were really supportive in helping me achieve that.
I started in Talisman in November, 2019. And without blowing my own trumpet, I have the highest Environmental Health score. I was elected to the UKAPP board within about nine months of being part of the organisation. I think obviously Covid had a lot to with that because, I often get quite a lot of congratulations for all the stuff I tried to do during covid. And actually I was purely doing it because I knew that if I didn’t, I was gonna get so depressed I might never leave the sofa again.
When the pandemic started, Aiden had said everyone needs to do something. And I was like, right, I’m gonna do something. I’m gonna do something and I’m gonna do it right now. Because otherwise I’m gonna cry and I’m gonna never stop crying. So we did few online things for piercers over Covid. And then when the next board election came up, I got nominated and I thought, I’ll accept the nomination because no one’s gonna vote for me anyway. And then I got like elected and I was like, okay now I’ve gotta be on the board
It’s been quite cool. I think we’ve done some cool stuff.
G: Why did you want to join the UKAPP?
D: I discovered the UKAPP around about the same time I met Nick. Me and Rae were very much baby pierces at that point and were constantly talking about where we wanted our careers to go. We both wanted to be UKAPP and APP members. To be honest, it was kind of mostly self-interested. It seemed like there was this group of piercers who had really demonstrated that they were hitting these standards. I just wanted to be a part of that, I wanted to show that I was as good as it was possible to be at what I did.
Especially after Lola and Sean had all the success that they did over the FGM issue, I think I definitely started seeing that this is an organisation which doesn’t just prompt piercers to be better, but also wanted what was happening to us to be better as well. And actually. maybe we could make some change. I put together my UKAPP application in July 2019 and after a few minor changes it was accepted in December, 2019. I was out Christmas shopping when I got the email, I was in a comic book shop buying Spiderman comics for my son and I did a little happy dance. It was really good.
The UKAPP is group of piercers who are meeting a certain hygiene standard and I know it’s a cliche but I am proud to be a part of the organisation and I’m proud that I’ve managed to consistently hit that standard.
UKAPP members at conference, 2022
G: Congrats on your position on the board! What are the UKAPP currently working on?
D: We’re going to be updating minimum standards. They had, in my mind, become just a little bit convoluted and reading the current standards was a bit difficult. So we want to update them, make them make a little bit more sense and easier to understand. We’ve added and clarified a few as well.
In 2023, we are adding sterile gloves as a strong suggestion. We are adding aseptic technique as a strong suggestion. In 2024, that will become an actual minimum standard and if you don’t want to use sterile gloves, you just have to let us know how you’re going to achieve an aseptic technique without the use of sterile gloves.
We will be updating jewellery standards to apply to non-healed piercings, which they already did but I think there was some confusion around that. You have to use something that meets the minimum jewellery standards for your initial piercing, but do you have to use it for downsized? Do you have to use it for troubleshooting? We are just clarifying that yes, unless it is a properly healed piercing, you need to be using jewellery that meets the minimum standard. And although this is not becoming a minimum standard, it is purely becoming a suggestion same as the use of a HEPA filter, in the sense that we think it’s a good and sensible idea, but we also recognise that it’s not possible for every studio. We’re going to suggest that jewellery transfer tools or anything that actually transverses a wound as you’re performing a piercing, should be single use and should not be reprocessed.
We’re also launching a journal! There was a lot of feedback that people weren’t being kept, up to date. The journal is our response to that, and if anyone has ever read The Point which is put out by the APP, it’s gonna be something similar to that.
We’re also going to take a run at creating a healed piercing standard because it’s obviously been something that nearly every UKAPP and APP board have tried and just never been successful. So we kind of feel like, it’s our turn. I feel like we all know what we mean when we talk about jewellery that’s suitable for healed piercing. We are not talking about sticking an externally threaded piece of steel or piece of non verified metal into someone’s healed piercing. That’s not what we mean. We are just trying to find a way that we can say it should meet these standards unless it’s for weights or plugs or something like that. But we just need to find a way to word that that actually works for the industry as a whole. I’m quietly confident in that one.
We’re also just continuing to work with Environmental Health Officers. I know it looks slow to an outside observer, and I absolutely understand why it looks slow. The thing is, when you talk about making change to the UK piercing industry, there is no central legislation which governs piercing at all. It’s all local and the reason that’s a problem is it means that you can’t make changes all at once. They have to make changes council by council and in fact, to be able to make centralised changes, you wouldn’t just have to have representatives of the body piercing industry, you would have to start arguing that many powers that have been devolved from Westminster to local government are then taken back to Westminster.
So it’s not just piercing, but also tattoo, hair, food hygiene, things like this. When you’re making change at a local council level, first off, you have to convincingly make the argument that the change you’re asking for is essential to public health. After you convince them of that, they then have to check whether it’s going to place “an undue burden on local business”. You then have to win that argument with one council, which is an enormous undertaking in itself. There are 333 councils in the UK and if one of them turns you back, then that suddenly sets a precedent that other local councils can knock it back as well.
I appreciate why it looks slow to people on the outside and it’s because it is. It is heartbreakingly, painfully slow to make the changes that we want to make for the UK piercing industry.
We did have a few things last year that have given us some hope, and I’m hoping that we can expand on this year. We might be able to approach things in a slightly different way without having to make new legislative change, but work within what already exists without introducing bylaws. So if that comes off, I’ll be thrilled.
G: What’s in the future for Angeles Piercing?
D: For the time being, I’m very happy coasting. I’ve got all the UKAPP board stuff and I’ve just started working with Infinite Body Jewellery to bring their jewellery to the UK. I’m not gonna lie, my wife Steph has done an enormous amount of the Infinite stuff because it’s her company to. But even so, I am still snowed under and the idea of expanding or doing anything big with the studio at the minute is a little way off.
I’ve reached a point in my jewellery collection where actually it’s not really fitting in the cabinet anymore. It’s looking a bit crowded. But I don’t have the space to add a second cabinet right now. Sometime in the future I think I would like to start my own studio. I would probably continue to work in Talisman and I would start a second studio maybe elsewhere. There’s no firm plans really, at the minute we’ve got a lot else on.
I do offer free consultancy services at this stage in my career, to help piercers get out of studios that they’re not happy in and set up on their own. And it’s something that I’d like to do as a job eventually, but I wouldn’t know how that would work in a way that I could like effectively make money from the people I want to make money from, but not take money from people who I think need the help. Rhianna’s UKAPP role as membership liaison is very much like, I would struggle to consider it anything other than free consultancy. Because Rhianna is really, genuinely terrific at their role in helping people become members. People don’t necessarily know that they can just reach out to Rhianna in an email and we’ll discuss anything. Does this meet standard? Does that not meet standard? And personally, I really like creative ways to meet UKAPP standards. I’m not saying that we’re gonna like bend rules, but I do like seeing people find creative ways to deal with problems that might arise.
For example, Rae at Ethereal Aesthetics, the way that they have set up their studio to ensure that it’s meeting those minimum standards or the minimum standards that they’ve set for them for themselves based on UK standards, it’s incredible. Like, it’s really incredible. When I first saw that building, I though there is no way that is ever gonna be where it is now. But they’ve done it!
It shows you don’t have to be like those huge studios that have the opportunity to just tear walls up and down at whim to be able to be members. My own studio is much the same, I’ve got maybe 20 square meters of floor space. It’s just tiny. But when I set up Angeles Piercing, one of my goals of becoming a UKAPP member was that I wanted to show that you didn’t need to be a really high volume studio to meet those standards. I think I’ve demonstrated that well.
G: Katasks – if you could change one thing about your studio design, what would it be?
D: A better jewellery display space because I’ve literally got one jewellery cabinet in quite possibly the most inconvenient location ever. It’s the only place I could put it that met standard and I hate it because it’s in quite a closed away location. So yeah, a better jewellery display space would be what I would change about my studio.
G: Jay wants to know – What is your Gregg’s order?
D: Oh, it’s two vegan sausage rolls and a bottle of Coke. Nice and simple. Have you been to Original Pasty House? It might just be a Devon thing. Their vegan sausage rolls are absolutely boss, like definitely the best ones on the market.
It’s the end of the day at the end of summer. A September Saturday, 2022 in a quiet park by an old church, nestled away within Nottingham city – three goths gather on the grass. Just kidding. Gemma had the honour of sitting down the absolute powerhouse of an artist, Anna Garvey. Business owner, traveller, life-changer and all round general badass, Anna operates between her private tattoo studio Revenant in Nottingham, Un1ty Tattoo in Shrewsbury and the whole universe on an actual boat. In this recorded interview conversation, we chat with Anna and Breo (beloved piercer at Rogue Piercing) about Anna’s work as a traditional tattoo artist, her development as a specialist post-mastectomy tattoo artist, her journey in the industry so far and some amazing stories from her travels.
“Memory is an interesting thing, you're never quite sure how true it is”
Gemma: You’ve been tattooing about 16 or 17 years. It’s ambiguous on the internet. Anna: I think that’s about right, I started when I was 18 and I’m 36 but I have had small breaks along the way.
G: What drew you to that industry in the beginning? A: It was an unusual calling because if you met my family, none of them really have tattoos or piercings. And also back in the old days, it was still quite different when I came into it, it wasn’t like athletes didn’t really have physical tattoos and film stars and stuff. Probably the first thing that drew me were music magazines, seeing rock stars and that subculture, the exciting nature of it. And then as soon as I got tattooed, I just completely knew that was what I wanted to do. There was a really nice chap in the studio when I got my first tattoo, he was doing a PhD in something to do with anthropology. He talked to me about the history of tattooing and gave me some books and it just opened up my world. I was already a real nerd, I’d sit in the college library and read every book I could about it. I just realized that this is a really ancient, human thing that also has a future. And that’s an exciting thing to be part of.
G: The early 2000’s, when you started tattooing, that was around the same time that the alternative scene in the UK was really starting to expand A: It was all like super subculture and then it kind of came into the light. In my early years, Miami Ink was the first tattoo TV show. And whether you like it or not, it revolutionized what we do in the public eye.
G: It’s the first time I saw a heavily tattooed woman on TV. A: You might see like a couple of the music mags, but the girls only had. Like a couple of stars or a little bit on their shoulder. Nobody had lots of tattoos on TV before then.
Breo: I think the fact that Kat Von Dee was that successful, in that time, is important. She had her own TV show, makeup line, tattoo business. She’s a very successful, heavily tattooed woman and that was a big deal in that era. A: There were women who were successful in tattooing, but nobody who had really broken in to the mainstream. “It’s a collaboration. It’s teamwork.”
G: How did you find being a young woman in an industry that was quite ‘male dominated’ back then? A: The rhetoric around gender as it relates to the industry has certainly changed a lot. Memory is an interesting thing, you’re never quite sure how true it is but I do think blissful ignorance was helpful. My Apprentice Master was a guy and so was everyone I worked with. I was a little feisty punk rocker. I was really self confident in some areas, really shy in other areas, I think youth was on my side at that point, because I just went in like a bull in a China shop and was like, “I’m doing this and nothing that anybody does is gonna get in my way.” And it didn’t. There were things said that when you look back, wouldn’t be okay now. It was just people giving you shit. I got quite a lot of shit off the customers. I actually had somebody walk out the chair one day. They sat down, looked at me and said, “you’re not fucking tattooing me, are you?” And just stormed out. But honestly it didn’t bother me that. I’ve always just been like live and let live. I never felt like, “I’m a girl and I’ve gotta prove myself”. I already felt like I had to prove myself. So it was nothing to do with my gender. It was to do with the fact that I wanted to get into a really difficult industry. And I knew it was gonna be tough and it was tough and it was definitely a lot tougher then in some regards. But yeah, I was just really big headed.
Anna & Aiden, living their best punk life
G: That’s a very powerful attitude to have. How did you get your apprenticeship?A: There was only one shop in each town. Everyone was still really territorial. t was just luck and a good combination of personalities. I put the work in and got my foot in the door and that’s how it happened. I’m super lucky that that’s the way it went. We see it all the time, people who really wanna do this, but I also realized that like I had to show my value to them. What reason do they have to take this kid on and welcome them into the shop? I’d show them my drawings and get to know everyone, I was already getting tattooed at the studio where I apprenticed. And then I worked super hard, scrubbed the skirting board., did every errand ever, worked overtime. At the same time, I was in college studying textiles, theatre studies and English. G: I would’ve never pegged you for a theatre kid. A: I used to really like behind the scenes stuff. I didn’t just dig it for the performance. I like it for the kind of literature side. We studied some really interesting plays like that taught me about history and culture. I quite liked that kind of coming together and making a project and seeing it through. So yeah, I was less of the performance arts kid and more interested in theatre and the the study and behind it.
G: That’s how I feel tattooing is, people coming together to work on a project. A: It’s a collaboration. It’s teamwork. And that’s the way I approach it. It’s not about me and my art and my career and what I want to do. It’s about how can we come together, bring ideas together and create something.
G: Your journey started in Shropshire but it’s taken you all over the world, what has that been like for you? A: Shropshire is a nice place to grow up and you definitely realize that more as you get older, how lucky you were to be born in the place that you were. B: I’ve never seen violence in that town. I have to say that, I’ve never seen conflicts in the streets. But it is a place with some sadness. A: Yeah, absolutely. I always wanted to travel and tattooing has afforded me that with the social networks behind it, the opportunity, the confidence. I was absolutely terrified when I first started traveling. At my first ever guest spot, I was so nervous that they closed the studio and took me to the zoo instead. But I knew I had to do it. And I was like, I just gotta do it. Obviously it gets easier and easier each time. It’s really taught me that you are responsible for your own path, you are responsible for how you respond to situations, you’re responsible for working through the things that you find difficult. Nobody else is gonna fix that for you, in a job like this., you’ve got to put the work in yourself and find the solutions for yourself. But every time I travel, whether it’s to Manchester or to Kathmandu, every experience is significant to my journey.
G: What took you out to Nepal? A: *adorable Anna laughter* Spontaneity, ADHD type behaviour patterns. Hunger for a change. I’d been running the business for a few years at that point and I was at the point where I could take a bit more time off. It was just one random Sunday night and I was looking for a European show when I saw Kathmandu. I’d never even considered going there. until I researched it a bit more and then realized that actually, it was in my reach. So I reached for it and I met some amazing people like Marie from France. She’s such a good, close friend. One of those people that even though we don’t see each other very often, I can genuinely see us being little old ladies and drinking tea and talking about the world together. Life just takes you places sometimes and you look back and think, “I don’t even know how I even got there but I did”. But going to the Nepal tattoo convention absolutely changed the trajectory of my career and life. The conventions that I’ve been to here and in Europe were a lot more like competitive and ego driven. In Nepal, it was a real meeting of minds with people from all over the world that are doing amazing work that are genuinely just there for the absolute pure love of what we do. I met people there that opened doors for me that will never be closed. So that was a hugely momentous experience. But then I also get a lot out of guest spots at friend shops where I’ve met new people. People that I’ve shared good times and difficult times with, partied with and worked very hard with. I think everything you do informs everything else eventually.
G: You paint a very wholesome picture of tattoo artists that I don’t think a lot of people outside the industry really see very much A: Everyone’s different and just because we do the same job it doesn’t mean that we’re anything alike. I’ve always said I don’t know loads of people in tattooing, but the ones that I know and have stuck around with me are really good, genuine ones, and that’s more important. Often we are quite sensitive and odd and we do this because maybe we don’t fit into mainstream jobs so we seek out something alternative and then we end up here. We all have difficult days. and times when we’re not sure. This a big thing that COVID taught me, we have to be grateful every single day. For me, it was really humbling. There are so many forces that are bigger than us, that we can’t control. So I think every single day we get to do what we love to do. That’s bonus.
“If you do nothing, nothing changes.”
G: Tell us how you got started with post mastectomy tattooing A: My apprenticeship was pretty solid and I was taught a lot about covering scars and stuff. It took me a awhile to realize this, but I just have quite a natural bonus that I’m not afraid of looking at scars and I’m not afraid of the emotional side of it. I’m a miserable goth at the end of the day, life is difficult and I’m okay with that. I don’t love it, but I’m okay with it. So I think that my personality helps. I’d done quite a bit of work covering scars early in my career like scoliosis scars, surgery scars etc. Then one client came to me and she’d had a full breast removal and I just knew I was ready to do this sort of work. It was just one of the most beautiful, beautiful tasks I’ve ever had to complete. The whole experience of it was amazing and I knew then that I needed to do more of this. I think my style of work lends itself to it, my personality lends itself to it. And I just put the work in, I put the word out there it just snowballed really. And now I do a lot of it, which is very humbling. Very special. Very difficult.
G: As the artist, how do you manage the emotional side of post mastectomy tattooing? A: That’s an interesting question. My long pause says a lot, actually. Of course my response is different with every person and with every situation. Sometimes it absolutely breaks my heart and sometimes it doesn’t because life is difficult and life is complicated. The phrase “close to the bone” came to mind but of course, with a full removal, it is literally close to the bone. It is close to the bone of life and death and the really difficult bit in between. It can be really hard but I like to exercise, walk my dogs, riding horses, doing something that humbles me and centres me, that’s kind of my way of dealing with it. But some days I am just completely, emotionally overwhelmed and I don’t talk about my feelings very much to anybody. But doing these projects reminds me that you have to grow and you have to change and you have to constantly be a new version of yourself depending on what life throws at you. Comforting is a difficult word to use, but it can be comforting, the fact that we all go through these things. And it doesn’t happen to ‘other people’, it happens to everybody around us and people that we know. Everybody’s having difficulties and it keeps me level and it keeps me humble and reminds me to take the joy while it’s there.
“It's beautiful to almost, share a misery with someone.”
G: Femininity can be a loaded topic but I imagine for some people, having a full or partial mastectomy might feel like they’ve lost some femininity. How does your style of art lend itself to that healing process? A: I’m not a massively feminine person in the way I present myself but I do think that my soul is quite feminine. I always look at post mastectomy tattoos as a technical project. It’s about the shape of the body. It’s about the way it moves. And that then knocks on to create the femininity. You might not have a breast or you have a different breast than before, but the rest of your body is still the same. Your mind is still the same, the way that you function in the clothes that you wear is still the same. So it begins as a technical thing, but then that inherently becomes an aesthetic thing. I find it really interesting how men respond to the post mastectomy tattoos. I was tattooing a guy the other day who I’ve worked on for quite a couple of years now and he was looking at one of the my mastectomy posters and he said “Genuinely, it’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful to look at. And it’s beautiful to know that you did that with someone.” B: It’s beautiful to almost, share a misery with someone. I don’t think it’s about gender, it’s about transmitting who someone is as a person, into the tattoo. I think you have to empathize to a level, that with a ‘regular customer’, for a ‘regular tattoo’, you don’t necessarily need to. A: Y’know, men can get a bit of a bad rep but most of you are bloody lovely and you love women. You love your wives. You love your mothers, you love your sisters and your cousins. And to see the response of men to the work that I do, I find it really interesting.
One of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever had with post-mastectomy tattooing was a client who, as she looked in the mirror, her husband came up next to her and put his arm around her and he said “I’m so happy for you, darling. I hope now that you see yourself as beautiful as I see you every day.” And honestly, I had to turn around because, I can get emotional about it in my own time. That was their moment, t’s not mine to claim. None of it is. I don’t claim any ownership over any of this. I just make a nice image. I’m the facilitator of that.
B: You literally change lives. That’s exactly how I see you it, you change the life of someone. You made something beautiful for them. They can look at themselves proudly. You create something with them that is priceless. A: It is emotional because it’s not just to how they feel as the person who has the tattoo, it’s about how relieved their friends and family feel that they can go forward.
G: For people who are a part of or who are aspiring to be part of this weird and wonderful alternative industry, what advice do you have? A: I can only advise from my personal experience. Our existence is only our own. But I do feel at this point in my life that I have turned my weaknesses into strengths. I hate not doing something just because I’m scared of it. Just go fucking do it. And then you do it. I know that if I push through that adversity, then things will be better. I will be better. And then there’s other times when it’s because you don’t have a choice. That’s that’s the way I look at it. If you do nothing, nothing changes. If you push through it and you can really dig deep and find the strength then you don’t what you’re capable of until you have to. You don’t know until you are really pushed and sometimes it’s other people and other factors and sometimes it’s you pushing you, but whatever it is, you’ve gotta just go along with it and keep pushing. You’ve got two options; do it or don’t do it.
“You can't just expect everybody to respect your decisions.”
G: So, Revenant. Incredible name. Especially when you opened it during a casual global pandemic in an entirely new city A: That’s what I mean by do or don’t do. The name just came to be in traffic on the M6 and I just knew straight away that was the name for my studio. We are all revenant everything that we go through when it breaks us down to our bare bones, and then we have to regrow and it’s super hard. We’re all, revenant every fucking day. So yeah, my clients named it. I’d had a really crazy few years and I had been dismantled by various various factors and I knew that it was time to change. Literally and metaphorically dismantled my life and then restarted it in Nottingham. G: Revenant is one of the most beautiful studios I’ve seen. In the nicest way, it feels like you’re in some kind of crazy old lady’s little secret cove. A: Wonderful. That’s exactly where you are. I like spaces and designing spaces and using them and also particularly being That studio space has been there for hundreds of years and I don’t know what came before and hundreds of years after we gone, guess what? It’s still gonna be there. We’re in a space where all of this creativity and this emotion and the laughs and the singalongs and the blood, sweat and tears are happening and it’s just a little blip in time, one day it won’t be our space. it’s very, very unique space. I mean, it was bloody hard to renovate. I think you have to lean into it as a space, I think there’s no point fighting it. It’s very old, it’s underground, it’s brick, but that created it’s own warmth. And as I’ve got to know it, it’s evolved into something with everyone that’s come through the doors and every piece of art in there and everything that’s happened, that all becomes a part of the whole space.
G: What’s in the future for Revenant? A: I don’t know. I’m at an interesting point of life. Rebuilding. And post COVID, I think we’re all just settling into how life looks now. How we feel about things and it’s gonna take a long time, obviously. So at the moment I’ve kind of taken my hands off the reins a bit. I opened my first studio at 24. I think some would call it maturity, but I’ve really just settled into being a bit more present and the private studio is wonderful for me at this time. I regularly guests at Unity and I love it because I get mega creativity. And they are like, in my estimation, so much above me,, and that’s where I need to be right now. But not full time. I need to be there to get that input from those artists that I really respect and that’s pushing me forward with my own private space at Revenant. But also life can change. I’ve really felt that the last few years I’m not gonna have any real long term plans. because I don’t know where it’s going to go. For now I’m really just knuckling down, working hard, focusing on my work on, on my clients and the studios space and we will see what unfolds.
G: How has the opinions of your family and friends changed throughout your tattoo journey? A: Yeah, definitely. And I am so genuinely proud of them. Pride could go both ways. You shouldn’t just be proud of your kids. It’s nice, if your kids or your family could be proud of you back. And I really am because my folks are a bit older. It’s not their world. There were difficult times to begin and now with the maturity of a 30 something, I understand. I did not at the time, but now I get it. Respect and understanding has to be earned and worked at and you can’t just expect everybody to respect your decisions. They’re really proud and they’ve met loads of people of people through my career that, you know, in former times they might not have sat down and had a cuppa with. They’ve seen everything that it’s afforded me and they’ve seen the ups and downs. They’ve really been there for me. And I could not have got as far as I got without their support, which took work. I got it and I appreciate it every day, I really do. They’re proud of the way that I look and proud of the fact that sometimes it ruffles feathers, but they’re like, ”Ruffle feathers, because you work for it!” I’ve been really lucky with that. I often speak to other people who are having slight difficulties with their families about their life choices and my advice is like work at it and talk to them and try to explain your viewpoint. And don’t be upset and angry at them for not getting it because their life experience is theirs and your life experience is yours. They have to take the ride with you and they have to learn it in their own way. Parents are people too and they have views of how their life was gonna turn out and how their kids were gonna turn out. It can be difficult for them when you don’t match up to their expectations. But if you can say “Okay, that that was the then, but this is the now. I’m way happier”, I think in time you can work through things. But if you wouldn’t die for them, their opinion doesn’t really matter. Most things in life are a reciprocal arrangement of some kind. And if it’s not reciprocal, then it just doesn’t really matter. It’s none in my business what people on the internet think, for example. And that’s why I don’t internet a lot as well. I choose not to open myself up to that. And maybe that’s partly because I don’t want to welcome aggro into my life, but also it’s just because I’m just not really that bothered what people think. I don’t need to share my opinion with you because it makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. I’ve got my biggest critic on my back all the time. I’m just really proud to be a part of something that helps people access a bit of themselves. We exist in a tattoo industry where we can live how we live and look how we look unapologetically and I think sometimes we don’t realize how brave and lucky we are to do that. And when we give people a little taste of that and a little taste of their own strengths, knowing that somebody else will leave feeling a little bit stronger than they came in. It’s really a privilege. And there’s a violence to what we do. Maybe, as people who are sensitive and have been through some shit, the violence in what we do is less of a worry. Tattoos and piercings are painful. Life can be painful. A piercing is seconds of pain, a couple of months of discomfort and that’s something that you’ve chosen and I’ve helped you do that. And like, I’m not super afraid of that side of it, of the blood, sweat, and tears. With scars and stuff, I remember when I first started tattooing over people’s scars and I was talking to my step mother about it and she reminded me that some people are really uncomfortable with that. With looking at scars or feeling scars. I think it can be a beautiful thing. And also it’s a testament to how awesome the human body and medical science are. The body will heal after we’ve chopped bits off and that’s an insane miracle every day and a very beautiful thing. Biology, art and science is the reason I got into doing what I do. I’m a great believer in the power of smoke and mirror and fiction and magic and all those things. I think it’s a really important thing to help us get through life. To create and to imagine and disappear into a good book or a movie and it’s just really special to have a role where you can do that. There’s a quote from Tom Robbins which I love: “Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.”
Based in Oaxaca, Mexico, Gorilla Glass was established in 2002 to created award winning, had crafted glass jewellery for body piercings. This week, Gemma was lucky enough to sit down the founder Jason and social media manager Atziri via video chat to discuss Oaxaca, where Gorilla Glass started and where it’s heading.
est. 2002
Gemma: How did Gorilla Glass get started?
Jason: Gorilla Glass was started in 2002, and it was actually my second business making glass piercing jewellery. I had a previous company named Liquid Glass, and basically I decided I was going to move to Mexico. I had been invited to work in a glass factory in Mexico City by a very good friend of mine, a glass artist from San Francisco. And so I started going down to Mexico, seeing the possibility of doing production down there. At that time, I was living in Vermont and northeast of the United States and I kind of opened up this opportunity to work with this incredible factory. Actually the thing that allowed Gorilla Glass to get started was Wildcat in England.
Founder Jason Pfohl
Glass are still very new in the piercing world at that time (2002). And I was basically going door to door and selling to shops on the East Coast. But piercers were still very sceptical of glass as a material. So it was really hard to get the foot in the door in the U.S. as far as setting up Gorilla Glass. But I had an opportunity to meet John, who was the owner of Wildcat at that time and I sent him photos of what we were doing and he said, “come to Brighton and show me what you got”. So I took a plane trip out there and being very American, I had a gun case full of all my glass jewellery. I opened up the case and he had never seen glass jewellery like that for piercings before. It was brand new at the time and because he was a real entrepreneur, he was always looking for the next thing. His first order was about $50,000 and that was my opening order. I said, “well, I think I’m going to start a company and move to Mexico!”. It was really thanks to John’s regular orders in those first five years that allowed Gorilla Glass to set up its’ own production line. What was really paying the bills and allowing me to get that project off the ground was the big orders coming in from Europe. So Gorilla Glass was largely thanks to England and that support that that allowed me to get everything up and running down here.
G: That’s awesome. That’s a really interesting connection. So, why the name Gorilla Glass. How did that come to be?
J: When I when I started the company, I wanted to have something that was a little bit funny but tough. I guess it’s something that sounded strong but also had some humour, something people could relate to. But I was also thinking a lot about the idea of evolution and the idea that we share 98% of our DNA with the apes and gorillas. Really, the difference between us and them is very, very small. Then the idea, with piercing body modification, was that you could continue to modify your body. So a kind of a play on all of those things, trying to do something tough and funny and something that would kind of be strong and but also this idea that we could continue to evolve.
We’re always evolving.
G: Is there much of a piercing scene in Oaxaca
Atziri: It’s still a little primitive sometimes and most of the people that have piercings have big earlobes but not all the people know Gorilla Glass. The people prefer titanium. But we have some friends that really love Gorilla Glass, they come for a Gorilla retreat. We had friends visit the factory in 2019 and get involved with the jewellery and they were fascinated! And now they’re one of the best ambassadors for Gorilla Glass. So sometimes when people come to visit Oaxaca, it’s to visit the factory and it’s become quite a touristic place sometimes.
J: We have a lot of international visitors. Piercing is developing in Mexico in a pretty dynamic way. We have the Latin American Body Piercing Association (LBP) and it’s been here for quite a while. They do an annual conference every year and we have people come from all over South America and Europe to go to that conference. I think the level of education is really advancing thanks to a lot of these health and safety organizations. I feel like there’s a whole younger generation of piercers who are coming in, who are very passionate about what they’re doing and really take that health, safety and sterilization very seriously. But I guess as anywhere, you still have a lot of street piercing. You can go on the market and buy unsterilized jewellery for $5. So you have the whole range.
We have our friend Sutra, who’s a local piercer and we recommend everybody to him because he works at a very high level and can do more advanced procedures like microdermals and scarification. We know him through the suspension community because we do a lot of suspension events at Gorilla Glass. He came originally as part of that suspension event.
We’re going to be more involved with LBP this year. We’re going to have a big booth there, and it’s actually a great conference. If anyone wants to get know Mexico a little bit, see what’s really happening in the piercing scene. I think that’s a great place to go and get a little window into what’s happening in Latin America. It’s very dynamic and there’s a lot of changes happening, but it’s small and that starts with a small group of really passionate people.
G: Absolutely. You said there’s a lot of larger ear lobe piercings in Mexico, do people tend to go for a larger gauge as standard?
J: The roots of piercing in Mexico go very, very deep and very, very far back. So there’s certainly a connection that goes beyond what we perceive in the Western world of ‘modern piercing’, because they’re reconnecting. The amount of jewellery that you can see in the stretched labrets, lobes and everything. There’s also a whole neo punk movement. t’s kind of an underground market in Mexico City where everybody has big, spiked haircuts and leather jackets. [
A: Like the punks back in the eighties with the key hole weights and that whole aesthetic. And maybe it’s following Hispanic tradition with the big labrets, big septums, big lobes.
G: Yeah we’re big fans that at Rogue. What what inspires you when it comes to the designs that you use?
J: Well Gorilla Glass had it’s 20th anniversary this year. So we have a long history of following trends and doing design. And Gorilla Glass has built its reputation on being a high design company. A lot of the ideas come from just watching trends in the industry and trying to come up with something innovative within what people want. You can come out with a design and it can be too ahead of its time. And then because we’re in a fashion industry, things come in and out of fashion. The thing that made Gorilla Glass really big in the beginning was glass spirals. No one had seen a glass spiral before, and we had glass spirals in all these different colours. At that time in 2002, it was something incredibly new. Now everybody has glass spirals. It’s nothing that would make you surprised or excited to see a glass spiral because they’re so common.
Designs come in and out. We had a period of years where we were doing very short themed collections and we’d choose a general theme every year. One year we chose the ocean, another year it was movement, we’ve done joy and happiness as well. Sometimes we would be inspired by current events. We did a resist collection when there was a lot of outrage about Black Lives Matter, we did that to raise money to donate to the Black Lives Matter movement. Since the pandemic started and made us kind of rethink what we’re doing as a business and also where we’re going as a planet, I thought “what does Gorilla Glass want to do for the next 20 years? And where are we going? How are we going to adapt?” Because times are changing and we need to be take responsibility for ourselves and as a company. We’re much more focused on basics now. What do studios need to do piercings? We’re really focused on the retainers, simple plugs, single flare plugs, things that help piercers in their studios on a day to day level. And all the extra stuff, which I love doing. like the design work, I’ll get ideas from all over the place. We just kind of sponge and see what we can get from the universe as far as ideas. And we have notebooks of ideas. Ideas are never the problem.
Upcycled Glass Earrings
But we really made a deliberate decision to kind of stop bombarding people with new designs all the time because it’s a cost of production to make it. And not just a monetary cost, but there’s also an environmental cost. So what’s really driving our design at this point, and since the pandemic started, is lowering our environmental impact. So we’re really focusing on the Upcycle Project, that gives us a lot of freedom as far as what kind of shapes or forms we make but we’re limited on the material we can use, we’re just using waste material for all of that.
That’s kind of been our main design impulse right now, working within the limits of trying to consume less and how do we stay relevant but actually make the company smaller? Because I think the responsible thing to do at this point.
G: That was one of the things that made me absolutely fall in love with your company The Upcycled Project. You do a lot for for the local community in terms of projects, can you tell us more about that?
J: We have a lot of different projects. For a few years we had an art gallery downtown and we invited different glass artists to be part of that. We also do sponsor different glass artists because I’m part of a glass community that’s very similar to the piercing community. It’s very international and it’s still pretty small. We invite different glass artists to do residencies and try and incorporate that into some of our piercing designs. But some of it is just art projects. And another big project for me personally was working with the prisons down here. We were doing art projects in the prisons, doing print making primarily. We have a print shop here and that was a project I was involved. Since the pandemic, I haven’t really been too involved, but pre-pandemic it was one of my main commitments. I would go to twice a week and we’re doing art making projects, many of which we would realize in the Glass studio with with the basis of designs that they would provide for us. We did a whole series of bottles with self-portraits on them, and so that’s been kind of a big ongoing project.
G: That’s incredible.
J: Yeah, the prison project’s pretty, pretty great, and it’s now grown. We’re still involved. We have friends who are more actively involved. And now that project has grown to five different prisons in Oaxaca including the youth prison, the women’s prison and a high security prison. So it’s really kind of grown and become much bigger than than what it started out as as a small thing. So, you know, a lot of times when you plant seeds and then they kind of grow on their own, that can be really one of the most gratifying things when you do those kind of projects. And we mentioned the suspension events that we do, they involve a lot of international people. But we invite locals in to come and do their first suspensions. Oaxaco is a real art city, we have a lot of print makers and graffiti artists. So almost all our friends are artists in one way or another and we got to suspend a lot of them for the first time in the city.
G: It’s amazing that you can give people that experience.
J: I think that the community, and working with the women here, that’s been a change for me in Mexico City. I mostly had men who I was working with. And then when I moved to Oaxaca , we made a deliberate decision to try and make more space for women. Glass is also typically very male orientated There were a lot of kind of macho glass makers in Mexico City. A woman would walk by and they would whistle at them. And you were belittled for not joining in. And that’s part of the nature here. But for me, I don’t want to be harassing people.
When we came here, I wanted to make something different. And not just a safe place for women to learn and have their own income and control because Oaxaca it is a very male dominated society in general as well. A lot of times women are dependent on the men, they stay at home and they take care of the kids and then have to ask the husband for money. And sometimes the husband maybe wants to go drinking instead of taking care of the family. So being able to give women the right to have their own income is really to empower them on a really deep level because they’re in control when they have their own access to income. Obviously the wage isn’t the same as paying somebody a wage in the U.S. or in England, but certainly the benefits we can offer are much greater. We do profit sharing here, 10% of our profits go to the workers every year. We have a free day-care here and full health insurance for all our workers and their families. Paid vacation every year. Bonuses that are equivalent to one month of salary. I’m very proud of the benefits that we have here and the opportunities that we’ve created. And I think it’s a good environment.
A: It is a good environment here, we have a secure space and a big garden for all the people. And we get our birthday’s off work! And in this part of the of the city, it’s difficult to have great work pay and security. Most of the people here work in labour.
The GG fam
J: It’s a big farming and agricultural area here.
J: Oaxaca has an art reputation. It’s it’s important to us to encourage the people to take value in their work. When we show them the picture of the people wearing the jewellery they feel very proud of their work too.
G: They should be, the work that you guys do is mind blowing. The things that you create are so beautiful. And it’s glass!
J: There is no real glass tradition in Oaxaca. There’s a lot of arts and crafts. Every community that you go to will have a different focus. One does black clay, another one will do weaving basket, making rugs. And so every town is kind of famous for its arts and crafts. There is a tradition of people working with their hands. But a lot of times in Mexico, they don’t value handmade things as much. They would rather get an electronic thing or an iPhone or these kind of things, rather than put value in kind of the tradition that they have. And I think that people have a real sense of pride when they learn to do the glassmaking. I think that’s an important part of both piercing and glass making as it can kind of give you a sense of identity and sense of value. It’s one of the things I love about piercing as well. You know, I think it really gives people a chance to feel better about themselves, which is so important now. And there’s a parallel to that that we see with the people making glass, is a pride of gaining knowledge and being able to work with their hands. So it’s really cool.
G: I love that. So what’s in the future for Gorilla Glass?
J: Well, we’re definitely focused right now on continuing to grow the Upcycle Project. We made a commitment to reduce our use of raw material by 50% over the next ten years. So that means we’re going to start discontinuing some product lines and we’ve been stockpiling waste for 15 years. Right now we’re organizing all of our waste to figure out what materials we can continue to sell and which ones we aren’t. The glass community is really going through a crisis right now. A lot of our glass comes from the raw material because we don’t melt our own glass, we buy raw material and then we convert it into jewellery. The borosilicate glass we get all come from the Czech Republic and a lot of the soda lime glass that we get, a large amount of that comes from Italy. And both of these countries are very heavily affected right now with the situation going on with Russia and Ukraine. So a lot of the future of glass industry for me right now is kind of in doubt. What I’m pretty sure of is that glass making as we see it now isn’t going to exist in 20 years. There’s things that happen politically, you know, like the war, which obviously has a huge toll on not just human life and animal life, but it also has secondary consequences like the energy crisis that’s happening in Europe. And to me, I guess you think that life is good and it’s always going to be good and then we have these surprises, like the pandemic or this war. You got to learn to navigate the terrain. For us, since the pandemic started, we’re trying to become more efficient. A lot of just really taking care of the team, figuring out what do we need to do and what do we not need to do. We had some really big boom years where it was like, let’s grow, let’s get bigger. And now the idea is not to get bigger, the idea is to get smaller and not because we need to economically, but I think everything needs to get smaller as far as our consumption goes. We need to get smarter. We really need to take concrete steps to do that.
J: That’s the plan, to keep stepping up to upcycle more and more. We’ve cut out a lot of side projects we were doing. We had a tourism project here. We were making more mainstream jewellery and doing tours with people coming in and we’ve cancelled all of our extra projects to refocus only on piercing. I feel like the next five years is kind of a transition for me to pass the company on to the next generation and kind of leave it up to them to where it’s going to go.
G: We’re very excited to see how things progress these guys because we’re all very big fans in the studio.
J: Really appreciate that. We’ve really noticed that kind of a lot more interest from England right now and also Scotland and Ireland. There’s a whole wave of new shops getting gorilla glass. It’s exciting for us.
Here’s to 20 more years of Gorilla Glass!
The Rogue team would like to thank Jason and Atziri for their time, their hard work and all the wonderful things they do for international piercing and body modification community.
Special thanks to Poncho the donkey for his vocal contribution to the interview and for bringing endless joy to everyone!
Today we will be tackling a broad and fascinating subject, and something we have to hear about fairly often working in a high quality studio. There are so many misconceptions surrounding piercing, especially as most people find their aftercare advice or do research for their piercings online. As we all know, the internet is a great and terrible place for misinformation and myths! We will be covering 6 of the most common piercing myths we hear, and explain what, if any, truth comes from them!
Nipple Piercings prevent you from breastfeeding.
This is quite a common one we hear! This is based on the fact that some people believe piercing a nipple can damage all of the milk ducts. The nipple contains on average 9-20 milk ducts, and a 1.6mm needle will never be able to permanently disable all of them. Clients with nipple piercings can definitely still breastfeed after a nipple piercing, and it does not affect your flow of milk! Keep in mind that we do recommend removing all nipple jewellery during the breastfeeding time period as it constitutes a choking hazard for your baby.
White Opal Nipple Barbell, available to purchase on our webstore.
Infections are Common.
It is fairly common for clients to mistake normal healing symptoms as symptoms of infection. It is also really common for irritated piercings to be called infections as well! This is definitely a myth, and a misconception that we are trying to change. Infections are in fact extremely rare – One in 10,000 if not more rare. Irritated piercings can be red, swollen and produce a small amount of clear/yellow/green discharge. This is entirely normal! However, when googling your symptoms you can cause yourself an unnecessary panic! We have a whole blog dedicated to irritations vs infections, which you can read here.
Infections are a serious medical matter – Thankfully practically unheard of in high-quality piercing studios!
Cheek Piercings Give You Natural Dimples
There are lots of myths surrounding cheek piercings, but this is the one we hear most often. The myth goes that you can get your cheeks pierced, heal them for 3-4 months, and then when you take them out you are left with beautiful natural looking dimples. This is far from the truth! Aside from the obvious fact that cheeks are a very complex and fairly high-risk piercing (read more on that here!), the main issue with this is that the scarring caused by cheek piercings is often unpredictable and almost never give perfect nor symmetrical results. Cheek piercings are a lifetime commitment and not something to be pierced on a whim. The best way to get dimples is to consult a facial plastic surgeon, not a piercer.
Nose Piercings can Paralyze You.
This is an odd one that we occasionally hear! We are not sure where this myth originated, but we do sometimes hear of it from clients. This one is 100% a myth and definitely nothing to be concerned about when booking for your piercing. On very rare occasions you may feel a small amount of mild numbness around the piercing site – This is due to initial swelling and is not permanent. This piercing myths may originate from viral news articles where a handful of people have had severe infections due to unsafe piercing practices that have resulted in long-term health issues. We work to the highest standards of safety and hygiene, and if you correctly follow our aftercare advice you have absolutely nothing to worry about!
Nose piercings are by far the most popular facial piercing that we offer.
The (insert ear here) side is the gay side!
This is one of the most common piercing myths that we hear! We have actually written a whole blog explaining its origins. This myth originates from the early days of the piercing industry, when it was still a very gay underground operation. Piercing was seen very differently then, and often was used as a method of silent communication between gay men and general piercing enthusiasts. We love this side of our history and are very proud of our roots, but this has definitely changed since the 1980s and we would not say that any piercing has any specific gay connotations anymore. If anything, all piercings should be considered gay as this is where our industry started!
Daith Piercings can cure Migraines
This is a difficult subject to discuss, and there are many pitfalls to consider. We will be taking a scientific approach to tackling this unfortunate myth. The daith piercing myth comes from old medical information regarding vagal nerve stimulation. The vagal nerve is said to be able to be medically stimulated to reduce chronic pain, however there is no evidence to suggest that the vagal nerve or any of its subsidiaries pass through the daith region of the ear. Traditional VNS treatments involve an implant in the chest, not the ear. In addition to this, vagal nerve stimulation has only ever been FDA approved for the treatment of epilepsy and depression, not migraines. Even with this approval, the success rate for this treatment has been fairly limited and more research is definitely needed. In terms of daith piercings, there is very little actual research. Most people offering daith piercings as a cure for migraines are relying on anecdotal evidence and small surveys, or reports that are not peer-reviewed or published in any scientific publications.
We really wish a simple ear piercing could be offered as a safe cure for migraines, but there is simply not enough evidence to prove this claim at this moment in time. We would not feel comfortable misleading people suffering from a distressing medical condition that a single piercing will cure them. We can offer a beautiful and safe piercing that can be a really nice adornment to your ear, but we would never want to take advantage of someone in pain. If you come into your daith piercing with an open mind and not put all your hopes into it as a cure, then that is the ideal way to approach it. The placebo effect is an incredibly strong psychological phenomenon, so it may very well work for you! We pierce dozens of daiths every week, and they are beautiful and fairly easy to heal as well. If it doesn’t work for you, you still get an epic piercing regardless!
Daith piercings are absolutely gorgeous, and the array of high-quality jewellery is almost infinite! We love performing daith piercings, so do not be discouraged by this unfortunate piercing myths.
We hope that this has shed some light onto some of the most common piercing myths spread about piercings. As with any topic, new myths and false information will always pop up so we may make this piercing myth post a series!
If you have any questions regarding piercings, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Tell us about your first experience with piercing?
My first ever experience with piercing was when I got my lobes pierced, but I was too young to remember, so my first actual experience was when I got my helix pierced. I think I was around 14, and my mum had got her daith pierced, and I begged her to let me have my ear done. Knowing what I know now, it probably wasn’t the safest piercing I ever had, but it was a new experience and I kind of just didn’t stop from there.
What’s your favorite piercing you have?
My favorite piercing I have currently is the one in my chin, probably because it’s more of a “fun” piercing, very short term and not viable. It’s a fun challenge to see if I can heal it, but in the meantime it’s just really cute! I love watching people’s reactions when they see I have a piercing in my chin!
How did you get into the industry?
I got into the industry through gaining my apprenticeship with Rogue. To be honest, I was extremely lucky with how I landed it. I left university and came home to Nottingham, got a local bar job, followed by a second job at a cafe. During this time I started visiting Rogue and slowly started to upgrade my jewellery to brands like neometal. (I was wearing a lot of odd sizes, and different materials like plastic). Upon talking to Kat and Aiden, I told them I was wanting to become a piercer, but I was working other jobs. I interacted with the studio online, but I also did a lot of home research. I started learning more about the APP and UK APP, and how they work and things like that.
I actually had a folder at home, with lots of their stuff printed out!
From there I got offered an interview with the studio, spoke about Harry Styles and One Direction a lot, and was just honest the entire time about what I liked, what I knew and didn’t know and fortunately, got offered the apprenticeship.
What’s your favorite thing about working at Rogue?
Probably the environment. The clients are absolutely lovely and always make you so excited to work with them. There’s no pressure to wear anything I’m uncomfortable with, I can be myself, I can also have a couple of biscuits with my tea if I want to. There’s the right level of pressure, do your job and do it well, make sure your stuff is done, keep moving forward and working and aspiring harder.
What are you most proud of in your career so far?
To be honest right now I’m just proud of making it this far. Every single day I learn something new, or I do something new and it’s all so exciting. Honestly, I’m just super proud of how far I’ve come since a year ago.
Jay’s first ever piercing, performed on Aiden
What does the future hold for Jay?
The future probably holds a lot for me but to be honest I hate thinking about it! I find if I make any sort of long term plans it always changes by time I get there! Plus I just really struggle to think that far in advance. I like to take every day, and every week as it comes by, and I just work with what I’ve got and what’s coming.
What are some challenges you’ve faced as a modded person?
To be honest, I’ve been extremely lucky when facing any challenges. I wouldn’t say I’m heavily modded or anything like that, although I suppose I might stand out a bit more in a crowd than your average person. I’ve been extremely lucky with working jobs where heavy makeup, and short dyed hair, and piercings were never an issue. They’ve also been a great conversation starter for people as well! My biggest issue has been with people asking if there’s other places I have pierced that they can’t immediately see, or purposely pointing out tattoos on my legs and chest which can be quite uncomfortable. Either that, or remarks from family, or people slightly older telling me I’d look much nicer without it all.
How did your family/friends react when you became a piercer?
I first wanted to be a piercer when I was 17 and was going to leave sixth form. My mum was really supportive and was behind me pursuing what I wanted to do. She’d just make sure that I knew what I was doing and that I had back up plans! For example, I was working a part time job as well. And then when I told my family I was dropping out of university to pursue it, again everyone was really supportive and happy that I was doing what I wanted to do. They’ve been really proud of me every step of the way, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
That’s such a nightmare question, I don’t watch movies a lot, and when I do I can never remember them afterwards!
What’s on your playlist?
The song I’m obsessed with rightnow is ‘Friendly Sex’ by Caity Baser. But overall it’s a really weird mix of 80s, 90s, and early 2000/2010 love songs. Although if you ask me again in about a week it’ll probably be something completely different!
What advice can you offer to aspiring and established apprentices?
Be yourself, and work hard. When wanting to be a part of a world that thrives on ‘being yourself’ it can be really easy to be swept up with trends, or what other people might be doing. It can be really easy to lose yourself when trying to fit in, and in the long run it doesn’t benefit anyone. You’ve got to stick to your guns, and be unapologetically yourself.
You’ve also got to work hard, whether that’s at your apprenticeship or the other stuff you’re doing. I worked two jobs before I gained my apprenticeship, and dropped out of uni when truly realizing it’s what I wanted to do, but every step of the way I continued to work hard. I finished my year at uni, taking every last exam and meeting, even though I knew I was leaving. Working hard is a really good way to prove your commitment to things, but also if and when you do eventually leave, it’s always good to keep those connections in life.
What’s some of the most valuable advice you’ve been given so far?
“It’s amazing what you can learn when you stop talking and start listening”
What’s your favorite snack?
I really struggle with having favorite things, I just normally fixate on something for a few weeks and then never touch it again! My latest one is probably magic stars. wonderful.
If you weren’t a piercer, what would you be doing?
That’s a tricky one. I think if I’d never had realized I wanted to do piercing, I’d probably still be at university studying acting. However, if I’d never have gotten my apprenticeship when I did, I don’t think much would be different. I’d still be working in the pub and the cafe, still trying to gain one!
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