I like piercings.
Not the actual piercing aspect of them, of course. I’m a self proclaimed wimp, but a stubborn one, so while I may yelp when I get my ears pierced I’ll stick through the pain and suck up any nerves around the experience. If I could fix my childhood arachnophobia with a bit of exposure therapy, I certainly did the same with my fear of needles. The pre-piercing anxiety is easy enough overcome.
The end result is worth it, after all.
A new piercing feels like a new haircut. You walk out of a parlor and try to catch your reflection in the windows of storefronts, in the rearview mirror of the car, anywhere possible. You feel glamorous, like how I imagine a bird would feel after finally growing its plumage.
But piercings offer something else: new places for jewelry.
It’s like if someone were to wake up with a tail, or another limb. It’s taking a part of your body that bangles and rings would have previously slid off, and with a few moments of discomfort opening up a whole new world of possibilities. Nose studs, earrings, septum hoops, curved barbells, there are so many bends and twists and options to it all that once you take the plunge, it’s easy to start shopping for more.
So, of course, the first thing I like to do when considering a new piercing is to shop for jewelry. Since there aren’t very many storefronts near me with large selections of body jewelry, this ends up being a lot of online shopping. Sometimes brand name realtors, but more often small, independent vendors and jewelry makers either peddling discount resale or their own, handcrafted wares. I like supporting small businesses, and I feel like the jewelry they offer is often more unique. It also feels a bit more personal ordering from a small shop, and I love when I get a handwritten thank you note or a little something extra tucked in as thanks for patience with shipping delays.
I got some free jewelry when I ordered my belly button ring.
I had fallen in love with a belly button ring that featured a cicada, or a wasp—some kind of insect with long, thin wings in gold and blue tones. To get free shipping I also nabbed some off-season Halloween earrings that were cute enough I could see myself wearing them, and after weeks of anticipation my order finally arrived in a small, nondescript bubble mailer envelope.
There was more in the order than I had purchased, and when I poured out the contents on my bathroom counter, the thing that caught my eye was a different piece of jewelry. It was a curved barbell, standard size for a navel piercing. The large ball at the bottom of it was a pearlescent, marbled white, streaked through with clear and some cream tones. It was striking, and the one I had ordered paled in comparison. It reminded me of an agate, with all the layers of striations.
The receipt in the bag had a small note written at the top, a squiggly scrawl.
It simply said, “Thank you for your purchase. A gift for you, from us.”
The decision of which jewelry I’d start with was a no brainer.
The problems started a few nights after I got my piercing.
I mean, there were inconveniences from the start. It’s shockingly easy to bump your navel jewelry on things. No one warns you that you have to be careful leaning against a sink when you wash your hands, or that the large pocket on the front of overalls becomes a no-go for your phone for a few months. High waisted clothing is out, and scrubbing with a loofah is a horrible plan, but there are so many little times that I didn’t expect that it got jostled. I suppose all of that is normal; growing pains are common when you’re trying to train your body to accept something new.
It was the fourth night after I got my piercing that I began to notice something was off.
There was a dark line on my jewelry. Up until that point, I had only noticed creams and whites, like marble or ivory. I started to worry as I looked closer. Perhaps those original pale colors were just paint or a coating on the surface, and that my repeated cleanings and occasional impacts could have scraped away part of the patina? If it was painted, could it be a cheaper internal material than I’d thought? Was that why it was given away for free? The bag didn’t have any information on what material it was made of—the rest of the items were all surgical steel, so I had thought it was fine, but was that a poor assumption?
Running my finger across the surface of my jewelry, I didn’t feel any scratches, and as I turned to see it from different angles, it appeared that the dark line was below the surface. Maybe I had just missed it somehow; there were a lot of different colors marbled together, after all.
Regardless, it was too late to do anything about it now. Anyone who has had a piercing will tell you that you are supposed to leave your initial jewelry in for a certain length of time. Changing it too early can result in irritation. Considering how much I was jostling it already, I didn’t want to add any more potential problems to my healing process.
Besides, what would I have done? Requested a refund for a damaged freebie?
There were other things that people don’t warn you about belly button piercings.
Earrings will occasionally get tangled in your hair if you have long hair. That’s common. It’s surprising when you find a hair wrapped around your belly button ring, but it happens. Similarly, irritation bumps are common with piercings. But when you get an irritation bump on a belly button piercing, the resulting zit-like blister can be large enough initially it tilts your jewelry to the side. It’s incredibly unsightly. Repeated cleaning is often the best way to resolve both of these issues.
It was about a week in, during one such nightly cleaning, that I found another hair wrapped around my jewelry. This one was short, and wrapped around the post. Looking closely at it, I frowned. The small hair was a bit longer than an eyelash, and black.
I do not have black hair.
I wracked my brain to think of where it could have come from as I carefully pinched it between my fingers. It wasn’t until I tugged it gently, and met resistance, that I shifted my focus from the hair to the jewelry.
The hair wasn’t wrapped around the thin metal post. As I gently shifted the bar around to look from other angles, it looked like it was stuck on the white, ornamental ball that rested right over the navel. I tugged again, slowly to see if there was any more give, and met without progress.
Squinting, close to the mirror as I could get, I realized where I had seen it before.
It was the same as the black line inside my jewelry.
It is a unique kind of revulsion, realizing that there is hair where there should not be. Like stepping into a shower, onto a clump of something that squelches between your toes, wet and intrusive. Or like finding a fine thread in your mouth and having to fish it out, feeling it floss against your tongue, unexpectedly sharp. It is a distinct and awful revulsion, made exponentially worse when you realize that it is coming out of what you thought was a solid piece of jewelry. One you chose to put under your skin.
It’s an even worse feeling, realizing that it is not actually hair.
When I pulled my hand away, it twitched.
And then, it was gone, faster than I had time to process.
…If I had to guess, it was just an eyelash or something that had gotten stuck somehow. My tugging must have loosened it, and then it just got blown away by the vent or something. That must have been it.
That’s what I had to tell myself, at least.
There’s no way that it retracted inside the jewelry. That would be absurd.
The excuses I made to myself were what was absurd, in retrospect.
I had a dream that night. My jewelry was no longer swirling whites, like marble. Instead, it was filled with coiled black threads, all bound by a thin clear membrane. In my dream, I poked it with a needle, and then gently squeezed it between my fingers like a grape. It popped in my hand and black things like a child’s marker-scribbles spilled out onto the counter. In my surprise, I pricked myself with the needle I was holding, and it stung near my navel. When I went to wash my hands of the mess, the black crawled up my arms, scurrying away from the water. I woke up sweating right as they began climbing by neck.
I wasn’t surprised when I went to clean my jewelry and found an irritation bump. They form similar to blisters due to friction on an area, and when someone twists jewelry around the way I had done, it happens. Actions have consequences. Just like zits, they go down over time, or can be lanced and drained of pus and blood if they grow too large. No sign of hair at least, so I was counting it as a victory.
The next time I saw it was over a week later, when I had almost convinced myself it was all in my head. Almost.
The not-hair was longer this time, and I didn’t touch it to begin with as I looked from different angles. It was sticking out of the same spot, and still appeared to be connected to the rest inside. This time, I grabbed it with tweezers to make sure I had a good grip, and I tugged, hard.
I expected it to snap off at the base, where it met the surface of the jewelry. Or perhaps for the whole twitching thread would come out.
I didn’t expect the jewelry itself to bulge outward with the tug. I didn’t expect the amount of resistance, and then the feeling of something breaking free. I didn’t its passage to leave a small crater in the top of the marble ball, the casing caved in without its filling.
Despite it all, despite all of my worst suspicions, I didn’t truly expect to be left holding something writhing, it’s long, spindly leg gripped firmly in my tweezers.
It looked like a tick, but with the fine legs of a spider. Perhaps it was just a spider, but that flat body was so thin as to almost appear disc-like, two-dimensional. Like a dark line when viewed at an angle. And the… mandibles? Fangs? Whatever it was, it looked cruel, even without the sharp appendage by its abdomen I could only imagine to be a stinger.
I won’t lie. I panicked. I know that it would have been smart to keep it for identification purposes, or even just to take a picture of it, but I needed it as far from me as possible. Tweezers in a death grip, I ran out to the backyard and threw the whole handful into the far bushes before bolting back inside to make sure there weren’t more of them dangling from my skin.
Much as I searched, and trust me, I searched, that appeared to be the only one. As soon as I felt sure that more wouldn’t burst out on me, I went back to the piercing shop to have them take out my jewelry. I spared them the lengthy explanation, because who would believe me?
At first my piercer cautioned me about changing my jewelry so soon, warning it would likely hurt and cause further irritation, but when they saw the carnage of my currently jewelry I think they were too surprised to push further beyond agreeing that yeah, it was probably a good idea to change it out. They switched my deflated nightmare fuel for a solid titanium piece that they assured me was from a reliable manufacturer. I tried checking for more information on my online vendor, but the shop appears to have been deactivated since my purchase.
The irritation bump hasn’t gone down yet, but I suppose growing pains are common when you’re trying to train your body to accept something new. It’s tempting to pick at it, but I know that wouldn’t be good for me.
As for the jewelry, I doused it in alcohol and sealed it in a ziplock bag. Several days of monitoring hasn’t shown any sign of motion. I did the same for all the other pieces I purchased from the vendor. No sign of life there either, but I don’t think I’ll be able to trust any enough to wear them. Maybe I can just give those away or something if I bump into someone else with a navel piercing.
A gift from me, for them.