04.12.08
Posted in Piercing News at 8:48 am by admin
Nae Morris was 5 years old when she had her ears pierced.
Now 20, the University of Michigan student has 13 piercings, stretched earlobes with half-inch holes and several tattoos. She also has scars in the shape of flowers along the side of her torso that were created by having her skin cut with a scalpel, a process known as scarification.
Morris’ mother, she said, is the only member of her family who is speaking to her after her aunt found photographs of her on a body modification Web site six months ago. It has been an ongoing battle with her family over the past several years to explain why she chooses to modify her body in different ways.
“I’m trying to explain when is enough, when is it bodily harm, and what does it mean to me,” she said, sitting on a stool in the Lucky Monkey tattoo and piercing shop on South Ashley Street on the west side of downtown Ann Arbor. “Everything I have done has to mean enough to me to be worth it to stand up to my whole family. And I’m still going.
“It feels right. It feels like it belongs, every piece fits in. … I’m slowly getting happy.”
Body modification is done for many reasons, aesthetic, cultural, ritual and psychological. Intentional alterations to the body run the gamut from the more socially accepted ear piercing and plastic surgery to facial tattoos, implantation of jewelry under the skin, and the permanent modification of organs, such as tongue-splitting.
Modifying the body has been part of cultural rituals around the world for ages. Foot binding in China, lip stretching in Ethiopia, tattooing in Borneo, breast augmentation in the United States and female circumcision in Somalia are all forms of body modification.
Modifications available in the tattoo and piercing shops in and around Ann Arbor range from tattoos and ear piercing to implants under the skin, branding and stretching.
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- Body Piercing
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- Healing Time from Body Piercings
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Posted in Piercing News at 8:44 am by admin
Hipsters beware: That naval piercing or nose ring may be hazardous to your health.
In rare cases, seizures, organ failure and even death can occur.
That’s the message from the California Department of Toxic Substance Control, which is enforcing a new state law that regulates lead in jewelry, especially piercing jewelry.
That law went into effect March 1.
“Body piercings may be particularly vulnerable to poisoning since lead can enter the bloodstream through the pierced areas,” Maureen Gorsen, director of California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, said in a written statement.
To get the point across, officials from the department were in Berkeley on Thursday at Zebra Tattoo & Body Piercing shop to spread the word that jewelry must have less than 10 percent lead as of March 1 and less than 6 percent by Aug. 30, 2009.
If they violate the new law, they can face fines of up to $2,500 a day for each piece in their possession.
Kerrie Naslund, 34, a senior piercer at Zebra for 16 years, said she is confident her shop is lead-free because it gets most of its jewelry from American manufacturers who provide certificates showing the metals in piercing jewelry they buy.
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Posted in Piercing News at 8:43 am by admin
If you need more ammo to convince your teenager that body piercing has its downside, consider these two words: lead poisoning.
That’s one point I hadn’t considered among the pluses and minuses of piercing. (My thoughts ran more to nasty infections, nerve damage, lifelong scars, and chipped teeth.) Thanks to California—the trailblazer, as always, when the news concerns nipple rings or tongue barbells—I’m now aware that when puncturing body parts, I should demand 100 percent lead-free hardware.
This month, a new California law aimed at getting the lead out of jewelry expanded to include body-piercing jewelry and adult adornments. Lead is now verboten in piercing jewelry and is limited to less than 1.5 percent in regular jewelry that doesn’t have a protective coating. Last September, the state launched the nation’s toughest standards on lead in children’s jewelry, banning jewelry that is more than .06 percent lead by weight.
That action came after multiple recalls of lead-contaminated kiddie jewelry nationwide. The toxic metal can cause permanent brain damage and resulted in the death of a 4-year-old Minnesota child who ate a lead-tainted charm in 2006. The effects on adults are less dire but include impotence, high blood pressure, anemia, and kidney trouble. Skin contact usually doesn’t pose a big risk for teens and adults, says Michael Berriesford, supervising inspector for the California Department of Toxic Substances Control. But piercing is another matter. “We’re concerned about piercing jewelry because of the fact that the metallic posts come directly in contact with body fluids or blood flow and could carry lead directly into a person’s system,” he says. (That tongue stud just became even less attractive.)
Despite lots of ink surrounding the California law, the message doesn’t seem to be getting through. Last fall, state investigators bought and tested more than 600 pieces of children’s jewelry after the law went into force and found illegal amounts of lead in 18 percent of them. That included a pirate bracelet bought at a Universal Studios gift shop and necklaces bought at big retailers including Marshall’s, Macy’s, GapKids, Toys “R” Us, and Claire’s. One necklace, bought from a gumball machine at a Church’s Chicken restaurant in Oakland, had more than 600 times the allowable amount of lead. Investigators are now expanding their enforcement efforts beyond retailers, to manufacturers and wholesalers.
The rest of the country should follow suit. Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota have passed legislation similar to California’s; other states, including Maryland, are pondering their own bans. But it would be much easier for manufacturers, retailers, and parents if there was a federal law covering all 50 states. A bill that would create federal limits for lead in jewelry is awaiting action in the Senate. But for now, it’s still body-piercer beware.
Berriesford says clues his investigators look for include low price, things made of metal that are heavy for their size, and things with a dull metallic luster. “There’s really no way a consumer can tell just by looking at it,” Berriesford says, “which is why we’re going through a significant amount of effort.”
If you, or your beloved offspring, are determined to pierce, California offers a comprehensive list (.pdf) of what’s safe. Think surgical-grade stainless steel or titanium, niobium, gold that’s 14 karat or higher, solid platinum, or dense synthetics such as Teflon (PTFE). Sterling silver, nickel, and other metals often used in inexpensive jewelry won’t do because they can spark allergic reactions. Nontoxic piercing: What could be more California than that?
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Posted in Piercing News at 8:42 am by admin
The State Government has been urged to pass laws to prevent teenagers from getting intimate body piercings, after a controversial tattoo artist started a campaign to give teenagers the right to pierce without parental consent.
In a move certain to outrage parents, Bob Anderson, owner of the popular Primal Urge Piercing in Hay Street, maintains that 16-year-olds already have adult privileges and should have the right to decide what they want to do with their own bodies.
“Sixteen-to-18-year-olds have the right to consensual sex and to learn to drive a motor vehicle,” he writes on his business’ website, urging young people to voice their opposition to the “do-gooders” who seek to restrict the piercing of nipples and genitalia to those aged 18 and above.
But Janet Woollard, Independent MLA for Alfred Cove, who introduced legislation in late 2007 aimed at protecting teenagers from the side-effects of piercing, said the move would be a disaster.
“Children are coming home mutilated and disfigured with pins, rings and studs embedded in all parts of their bodies and there is nothing parents can do to prevent it because this State does not have a minimum age for body piercing enshrined in legislation,” she said.
Dr Woollard’s private member’s Bill would bring body piercing into line with existing laws preventing children under 18 from being branded or tattooed.
Currently, there are only ethical guidelines for body piercing, issued by the Department for Communities, that recommend the restriction of intimate piercings to those over 18 and parental consent for piercings for any other body part for a child aged below 16.
Mr Anderson said such restrictions were futile, suggesting that teenagers would not wait until they turned 18 to be pierced.
Child Protection Minister Sue Ellery said she supported the same approach to body piercing that exists for tattooing and branding and requiring teenagers to seek parental approval.
Dr Woollard said she hoped to table her Bill within the next few weeks.
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Posted in Piercing News at 8:41 am by admin
In the past two weeks, the Federal Reserve has lent or guaranteed at least $57 billion to investment banks. This sudden infusion, the first to Wall Street firms since the 1930s, underscores the financial emergency facing the nation. Yet just last June, the markets were euphoric. How, within nine months, could a lending bubble inflate to gargantuan proportions and then burst into this credit market disaster?
Two points are fundamental as we piece together what happened. First, this is only the latest in a series of modern financial bubbles that have collapsed. Second, while we cannot prevent bubbles, we can prevent a recurrence of this one.
Financial bubbles occur regularly on both the debt and equity sides of investing. Recent ones include the conglomerate stock craze in the 1960s, the junk bond and Japanese excesses of the 1980s, and the dot-com speculation of the late 1990s. The interaction of crowd psychology and the betting nature of markets cause these episodes: After a certain upward point, market momentum can become self-perpetuating — until it reaches such a peak as to collapse onto itself. Much like putting too much air into a balloon.
Over 2004-05, there developed an unusual combination of low interest rates and low inflation, reasonable growth, and a surplus of global savings recycling into the United States. This meant that all types of lenders were highly liquid but faced low yields from traditional lending practices. Seeking better returns, they lowered credit standards and lent to weaker parties, i.e., subprime mortgage borrowers and over-leveraged firms.
The headlines have been reporting what happened next, but the amount of credit that was extended to these weaker borrowers is amazing. Historically, C-rated borrowers have been unable to borrow much from public-debt markets because over decades more than 30 percent of such low-rated debt has defaulted before maturity. In 2006, more than $25 billion of these securities were sold; the previous 10 years, the average was $2 billion.
The music stopped when home prices, which had soared for five years, finally plateaued and then began to fall last year. This reversal spread nationwide and weakened the entire economy. Unable to refinance, countless overstretched homeowners could not make their mortgage payments. Suddenly, defaults loomed, and every lender changed his stance overnight. Deleveraging became the goal, and the credit spigot was shut.
It was, as always, too late. The Fed has poured emergency liquidity into the financial system to avert a collapse, but foreclosures have already skyrocketed, and hundreds of billions in credit losses have been realized. Our country is headed into a recession.
Several lessons are apparent:
First, too much credit was extended by entities that were not regulated, such as the special-purpose, off-balance-sheet vehicles created for leveraging up pools of mortgages. No minimum capital requirements applied to these, nor were they required to disclose their results. In the future, most of these vehicles should be regulated and subject to both sets of controls.
In addition, the largest investment banks have been made eligible to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve. In exchange, they should be subject to Federal Reserve or equally strong oversight. Requiring J.P. Morgan Chase to bear more of the cost of the Fed’s guarantee for its acquisition of Bear Stearns is a small start, though the Fed is still on the hook for the lion’s share.
Second, the exotic character of so many new financial investments is an issue unto itself. Many, such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, carried greater risk and generated more leverage than market participants understood. The world financial system would be better protected if certain buyers of such instruments were subject to enforceable margin requirements, and issuers of them were regulated and subject to capital requirements.
Third, the books of our largest financial institutions are not sufficiently transparent. The retained risks on their off-balance-sheet financings, for example, were not known to their shareholders. This is inappropriate. The Financial Accounting Standards Board, working with the Securities and Exchange Commission, should expand public disclosure requirements applying to these transactions.
Fourth, the credit rating agencies performed poorly. They assisted in creating some of the least transparent and shakiest financing structures. The SEC should require their boards of directors to annually certify, with corresponding liability, to the independence of the ratings process from borrower influence.
Fifth, mortgage brokers created countless inappropriate or fraudulent mortgages. This isn’t surprising because they are paid to originate. Whatever happens later to the homeowners or lenders is immaterial. Going forward, there should be national licensing for mortgage brokers that embodies the know-your-customer rule for securities brokers. Non-bank mortgage lenders should also be governed by the same capital requirements and regulation that apply to bank-owned lenders.
Borrowing conditions may not return to normal (pre-2006) levels for at least two years. And we may not see speculative excess for a much longer period. It will return in another form, as bubbles always do. Let’s not, however, have a repeat of this one.
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Posted in Piercing News at 8:39 am by admin
California’s perennial debate over how much it is and should be spending on its largest-in-the-nation public school system has escalated sharply this year as the state faces a whopping budget deficit and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes - whether seriously or not is uncertain - to take a big bite out of the schools’ money to close it.
The educational establishment and its allies in the Democratic leadership of the Legislature are howling about the governor’s proposal that school spending be whacked by $4.8 billion from what the constitution otherwise would require it to be through the 2008-09 fiscal year.
The Democrats have vowed to block any budget that makes a substantial reduction in state school aid and the California Teachers Association and other school groups have resumed their high-decibel complaint that California’s per-pupil spending is already near the bottom of the states.
Republicans and other critics, meanwhile, complain that California is wasting much of its school money on bloated administration and ineffective, faddish educational nostrums. They cite the state’s near-bottom rankings in national educational achievement test scores.
In the midst of this debate, the Census Bureau on Tuesday issued an extremely detailed accounting of what states (and the District of Columbia) are spending on their schools. It undercuts the mantras being chanted by both of California’s warring political factions.
Unlike other statisticalcompilations about school spending, the Census Bureau’s report is based on hard numbers, is as up-to-date as such data can be (2005-06 fiscal year) and, most important, includes financing from all sources and spending on all categories, rather than the selective figures being batted around by others.
The Census Bureau report strongly refutes the oft-cited “fact” that California is near the bottom in per-pupil school spending. The national average was $9,138 in 2005-06. California was at $8,486, with New York the highest at $14,884 and Utah the lowest at $5,437 - one of 22 states, in fact, that fell below California’s level.
In terms of school revenues, California was 25th among the states at $10,264 per pupil, just under the national average. It was above average in per-pupil income from federal and state sources and about $1,700 per pupil below average in local revenues, thanks to Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax limit measure.
Overall, therefore, California isn’t nearly as deficient in school financing as the education establishment would have us believe. But neither is it wasting money on administrative overkill, as critics on the right contend. Its per-pupil spending on non-instructional “support services” was in fact, slightly below the national average at $3,050, although the sub-categories of overall and school site administration were a bit above average.
The most important aspect of the school spending reports, however, is that they underscore the truism that there’s very little correlation between the amount of money a state spends on public education and how its students fare in academic tests, dropout rates and other measures of educational performance.
California is second from the bottom, for example, in fourth-grade reading scores on national achievement tests, ahead only of Washington, D.C. But Washington is very near the top in per-pupil income and spending at $18,332 in revenue and $13,446 in spending. Conversely, many states nearer the bottom in per-pupil spending, including Utah, outrank California in test scores and other measures.
Money may be important, but it’s clearly not the only factor determining how well schools are educating children. We should be paying attention to what the kids need, not the political goals of adult warriors.
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Posted in Piercing News at 8:36 am by admin
CHURCH HILL, Tenn. (AP) — A Hawkins County tattoo business operator has been charged with giving tattoos and body piercings to underage teenagers.
Thirty-six-year-old Jerome Rufus Flannigan of Rogersville was arrested on Thursday and charged with two counts of child piercing and one count of child tattooing.
Flannigan, who is on probation from Sullivan County convictions that include aggravated assault and drunken driving, was held without bond pending arraignment Monday.
Church Hill police say the mother of a 15-year-old girl reported that her daughter had received a tattoo last month at Irish Creek Tattoos.
Police say Flannigan is also accused of piercing a tongue and nose for two more 16-year-old girls.
The charges are misdemeanors punishable by up to 11 months and 29 days in jail each.
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Posted in Piercing News at 8:34 am by admin
In my opinion, there is nothing that says, “Look at my NOSE!” like a glittering gemstone in a pierced nostril.
I see a lot of adorned noses, but I can’t imagine getting one. Not that they are not attractive on the rare individual with flawless skin and a sculpted proboscis, but the Janet’s World Institute for Facial Statistics reports that, for 71.9 percent of us, the nose is not our best feature.
If anything, I might consider getting some other part pierced to divert attention from my nose. But what? I cannot at this point go with the belly-button ring, unless I decide to reveal the topographical relief map of Asia that appeared on my stomach after the birth of my three children. Similarly, a decorative ring on my chin would only declare, “Two-for-one sale!”
But my point about pierced noses is this: even if one’s nose is perfectly proportioned and alarmingly cute, it is not just a feature-spacer like the cheekbones, forehead or chin.
It is command central for our sense of smell, affecting our sense of taste. It facilitates inhaling and exhaling. It’s the part that alerts us to allergy season in Maryland, running from about August until November and March through June. And it’s a facial “mood ring,” warning us to take refuge indoors by turning a mottled gray in the frosty winds and brilliant red in the unrelenting sunshine.
So I think we must respect the nose, and not pierce it on a whim. We must check out the Boston Children’s Hospital Web page “Body Piercing, a Guide for Teens,” so that we can get the willies (http://www.youngwomenshealth.org/body-piercing.html).
Yes, this is one of those Web sites we should pass around to people interested in body piercing so that they can make an informed decision while having the living daylights scared out of them, with its helpful hints about potential HIV transmission and nerve damage resulting in loss of feeling at the piercing site.
But don’t fool yourself that this is going to dissuade the individual on the road to a body piercing, even if accompanied by your reasonable, strident or pleading argument.
Once, one of my son’s friends announced she was getting a tattoo. I immediately launched into a story about how I had recently been standing in line behind a woman at a black-tie event, and how my first impression of her was not of her fabulous gown but of this distracting grayish-blue blur on her shoulder — a faded phoenix tattoo. I offered to pay my son’s friend the cost of the tattoo NOT to get one. All the while, my son was making the frantic “cut” symbol.
“Mom, she’s made up her mind,” he said. “And you are not her parent.”
Well, this has never really deterred me. Recently, my niece asked my opinion on getting her nose pierced, and I managed to overcome my natural shyness to shout, “Don’t do it!”
I’m sorry to reveal the politically incorrect truth — jewelry in the nose, lips, tongue or eyebrows just invites rude staring by people like me. We cannot help it. We are consumed with wondering what would happen if you bent to pick up some shoes in a dark closet, and your eyebrow ring got caught on a hanger? Or if you’ve had to give up cool spices like Old Bay with a pierced tongue? Further, even though it’s disgusting, we want to know if you’ve ever sneezed out your stud?
And all the while, we are not noticing your lovely eyes, your shiny hair, or your beautiful smile. Like in the “Tide to Go” campaign, the noise coming from your facial piercing is — at least initially — overpowering any other message you might like to convey.
So please forgive us NOSE GEM if we appear distracted EYEBROW STUD when we’re talking to you MULTIPLE LIP RINGS. We’re just NOSTRIL BAR a little CARTILAGE BARBELL old-fashioned.
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