venta

Am I normal? Question n in an entire lifetime's series...

Every so often I hear people say things like "yes, I used to wear a nose ring, but I haven't put the ring in for two years, so the hole has begun to close up".

Now I - being very staid and boring - have no bits of me pierced beyond the conventional one-hole-in-each-ear-lobe. They were done in about 1994.

I'm fairly poor about remembering to switch earrings, so usually I have a pair of sleepers which just stay in except on very rare occasions. About once a year I lose one earring, and have to scrabble around to find replacements. At present, I have lost all but one of my silver sleepers, and was wearing some little black smiley faces. Mid-January, I lost one of them, too, and for a couple of weeks wore no earrings at all.

By the time I foraged around and found some new ones, the holes in my ears had begun to close over and putting in earrings was quite painful. For a week or so, the holes were sore and a bit icky, and eventually got the hang of things again and went back to being what you might expect for a piercing that has been there for getting on for twenty years.

So... what I want to know is: how long is it customary to be able to leave a piercing for without it beginning to close up? I've always inferred it to be quite a long time, but personal experience contradicts that.

Does it vary depending on the body part? And why, when the edges of the hole are presumably completely healed, does it decide to start growing back over anyway?