Navel piercings typically take four to 12 months to fully heal, but if you take proper care of your piercing, you can make the process go more quickly and painlessly. Cleaning and caring for a fresh belly button piercing prevents the irritation and infection that could otherwise slow down the healing process.

Changing your pierced earrings doesn't have to be a challenge as long as you take measures to make the process safe and sanitary. If you are changing your pierced ears for the first time, don't be tempted to remove the studs, however, until your ears are completely healed.

After getting your navel pierced, you need to make sure you keep the ring, as well as the area surrounding the piercing, clean and sanitized. Cleaning the jewelry and the piercing daily will help keep the hole from getting infected as it heals.

As a piercing heals, scar tissue forms. In the process of forming scar tissue, your body sheds dead skin cells. Your piercings may also secrete blood and plasma. While a foul odor coming from a piercing can be a sign of infection, it may simply be a sign that your piercing is not clean enough.

When you get your nostril pierced, you are making a puncture wound in a thick piece of cartilage. Cartilage piercings take significantly longer to heal than those that go through a flap of skin, like an earlobe.

Regardless of the location of a piercing, several choices are available when it comes to jewelry. The circular barbell is constructed in the same way as a standard straight barbell – with a post and a threaded ball on each end – but as the name implies, it has a circular shape.

If you haven't worn earrings in a long time, the holes in your earlobes may have closed. If you feel a small knot in the skin where the hole is, it is more than likely the fistula, or skin tunnel, created when your piercing healed.

Bumps are common occurrences on nose piercings because they are easily bumped, and cartilage also takes longer to heal than the fleshy areas of the body such as the ear lobes. They often appear as red bumps right beside the piercing, and can be very hard to resolve.

Body piercing uses a cannula, or hollow needle, to make a clean slice through skin. Because the needle enters the skin and comes out the other side, a piercing should be treated like any other puncture wound.

Depending on geographical location, certain types of needles for body piercing procedures are illegal. Inexperienced or unprofessional piercers use sewing needles or piercing guns to pierce body parts not realizing the dangers of that practice.

You can stretch an existing ear piercing into a large-diameter ear piercing. If you do not have pierced ears, you can pierce your ears at a large gauge. Typical ear piercings, from a piercing gun, are a small gauge, such as 20.

While body piercings may be considered a fashion statement or an adornment, in some cultures body piercings are considered part of a spiritual journey. Believers of Hinduism or alternative medicine believe that piercing the belly button aligns or improves function of the third chakra, the solar plexus.