Today’s blog post is a bit of a long, educational one, but bear with us, it’s extremely useful to know!
So, tongue piercings. Super popular, super cute! A standard tongue piercing is vertical, through the centre of the tongue. They have a bad reputation for being ‘dangerous’, with many people being scared of bleeding to death via a botched piercing through the vein. Tongue piercings done RIGHT, by professional, trained piercers are no more dangerous than a helix piercing.
Tongues are basically two muscles, held together working in unison. You have your main two chunky veins in there, one running through each side. You also have a little frenulum (tongue web) holding the bottom of your tongue to the bottom of your mouth. A standard tongue piercing will be placed in the centre, slightly avoiding this tongue web and missing your veins by a mile.
Okay, so what about the notorious ‘snake eyes’ and surface tongue piercings? BAD. Very bad. As mentioned about 30 seconds ago, your tongue is two muscles working together. Snake eyes and surface tongue piercings go through these two muscles and basically trap and hold them together with a piece of jewellery. This causes a TONNE of problems from the start.
Most people will suffer from speech impairment (a lisp) which CAN BE PERMANENT, after having one of these piercings. This is because the two muscles are trapped together and cannot move properly to pronounce words.
Then there’s dental damage. Granted, a standard tongue piercing CAN cause dental damage if it’s not placed correctly or is chomped on a lot, but two large metal balls on the tip of your tongue will constantly knock against the teeth, causing them to chip and/or erode. You only have one set of natural adult teeth – look after them! They’re expensive to fix…
The scariest thing of all is the danger of catching and piercing those big chunky veins in either side of the tongue. We’ve all heard horror stories, but unfortunately, these stories are often told from experience. Piercing these veins is extremely dangerous and can lead to massive blood loss and a hospital visit.
Okay, scary stuff over.. Ish. We have experienced these effects first hand when a lovely young lady approached us late last year with a 2-day old surface tongue piercing done by a ‘professional piercer’ not too far away. To start with, the jewellery was a hand-bent bar which was extremely uneven and wasn’t up to standard for a fresh piercing by any means. Secondly, this poor lady was evidently finding it difficult to speak properly since having this piercing and had very limited movement with her tongue – meaning she could barely stick her tongue out past her teeth. We thankfully caught it early, removed it, gave advice and education and sent her away to heal. Hopefully, she had it removed soon enough to not have any long-lasting complications to her speech or tongue movement. (see below)
We don’t mean to lecture, we simply care about your health. Your tongue is important, it helps you speak and helps you eat, drink and swallow – don’t compromise that for the sake of a piercing.
We will never perform a surface tongue piercing or ‘snake eyes’ at Taattoo, but would be more than happy to discuss other options!
Venoms/paired tongue piercings are a great alternative which is safer and easier for you and your health. Give us a message on any of our social media @taattoobodypiercers or come in and see us!
(above images are ‘venom’ piercings – not performed by us. Credit to the original piercer/s)
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