How To Prevent A Piercing Hole From Closing
Piercings fill your ears with beautiful jewelry but can be difficult during the healing process. You need to follow the proper aftercare routine daily so they don't become infected and irritated. This includes only cleaning them with a sterile saline wash. Your hands should always be clean when you touch them, and you should never rotate your jewelry.
Properly caring for your piercing will allow them to heal without any complications. The average time for this to happen depends on where you got pierced. Lobe piercings are the most common, least painful, and take the shortest time to heal. Maria Tash explains that they take about two to four months. Piercing the cartilage of your ear takes longer to heal because there's less blood flow to that area. For helix, rook, conch, and tragus piercings, it will take six to 12 months. Once you've passed this stage of healing, you won't have to worry about the hole closing. Until then, follow this one rule to ensure it'll stay open.
Keep your jewelry in
The best way to prevent your ear piercing from closing is to leave the jewelry in. During the initial healing process, you should never remove the jewelry. Inverness warns you should never go longer than a day without anything in a fresh piercing, or it will start closing within hours. You could also injure your tender ears when trying to put new jewelry in and prolong the healing process.
After the first six months, you don't have to worry as much if the stud accidentally falls out for a few hours. During this stage of healing, your piercing will shrink before it starts closing. A explains that once you've had the hole for a few years, it will take multiple weeks of not wearing any jewelry for it to close. If you can't keep your metal earrings in for athletics or a dress code, you can change them after the initial healing phase. Clear glass jewelry will keep the space in your piercing open while looking discrete.
What to do if they close
If you think that your piercing hole is closed, the one thing you shouldn't do is try to force your earring back in. It may have just shrunk and not closed completely. Trying to push an earring through it can be painful and rip open your healed piercing. When this happens, you put yourself at a high risk of developing an infection, swelling, and scarring. The last thing you want is to form a piercing bump or keloid over a perfectly healed piercing.
The best thing for you to do is to go to your professional piercer, according to Today. They will let you know if the hole just shrank or closed from the back. They may use an insertion taper to stretch it open to place the earring if it's not healed shut. However, if it is closed, they will let you know when the best time is to re-pierce it.