When girls wanted to prepare their ears for earrings in Poland of my childhood, they needed a hot needle and two pieces of cork. (I feel very ancient now writing this.) I guess the heat of the needle was a way to sterilization. One of the cork pieces was for the helper piercing the hole, the other would be placed strategically to prevent further injuries. I was told that the process was far from painless. So sometimes some alcoholic anesthesia was very welcome. Still many girls would get infections. It was a big deal, not easy, a test.
In Germany here in the United States and of course in Poland today, other methods are used to pierce ears and tongues and what not. Are these new openings in the skin trophies of special experiences? Is it a bonding experience to meet somebody who has put metal into some more or less intimate parts of their body? Is it a happy experience to see that the experiment did not fail?
I am writing in this strange way because I saw my first tooth piercing. There were two giggling girls on the subway sitting across of two giggling girls who were much younger. One of the older girls had the tooth piercing. I have seen many things before. Much can be done to teeth.
I had a tiny music video company once and we agreed to shooting the video for a very new upcoming artist. The producer wanted to pump a lot of money into the project, the artist was very obviously a faker, just put there to move his lips and look pretty. (He actually dropped his pants a few months later to show off his body for a magazine called Playgirl.) The artist was all about looks, his real job was bouncer at a club, his body was quite exciting, his only problem were his teeth. They did not look quite right on this sunny boy. The producer gave the young man a lot of money for a special procedure to adjust his teeth. Where there is money and a person who things that they are going from bouncer to sex symbol, there is plenty of room for mistakes. The “artist”, whom I would only like to call “Z“, expanded on the idea of procedure and had a platinum Z incorporated into his front tooth. A platinum Z. Sounds cool, looks horrible. The mouth does not come with spots, so a polished Z had nothing to reflect but the upper lip. The upper lip is not illuminated, at least not from the inside, so what the man ended up with was a non removable black Z that looked like a piece of lettuce stuck to his tooth for good. And because the Z used a lot of platinum, it was big and looked like an L or a < most of the time. It was pretty sad. I can only write this here, because the final product never made it to the market. “Z” was supposed to compete with Milli Vanilli and when their cover blew the producer tried every trick in the book to not continue with the project. I will maybe explain some other day.
Back to the tooth piercing. The girl on the subway today had a ring with a little bead in one of her front teeth. It looked... unusual. It was not incredibly pretty or interesting. Have tooth piercings been around for a while now? Have I missed another trend? What are the wildest piercings you know of? Do you have piercings on your body? (I have none.)
Oh and the girl was an au pair. She has spent a year in New York and was now passing on the baton to her friend. They were both from Germany. They told me. And I forgot to ask about the tooth piercing. I guess I am getting old now.