Body piercing has a long history. While in today’s standards these body piercings usually encompasses some form of jewelry as a means of self-expression, this has not always been the case. Throughout history, the concept of body piercing has been utilized by tribes around the world. In most cases, these tribes would use body piercing as a pathway and sign that one has passed on to adulthood. Some tribes believed that you could not go out on a great hunt until you were a man and had your piercing. While as compared to today’s piercing, these may have seen extreme, in most tribes it was common place to do a piercing with a piece of wood that was driven completely through both cheeks or even through sections of the abdomen or chest.
Mummified remains of pierced persons dating back to the Paleolithic era have been found in recent times. Of all of these that had piercings, one even had an 11mm flesh plug in the ear. That is the equivalent of a 000 gauge in it diameter.
Even I the bible as far back as Genesis, one can find records of piercings in which a servant of Abraham gave the wife of Isaac a nose ring. While in today’s conception, the Christian faith frowns on the mutilation of ones body through piercing unless it is a woman with her ears pierced, the fact remains is that it is an old tradition dating back to the days when tattooing became a common place.
Today, piercing has taken on an entirely new phase. It was back in 1967 when Jim Ward did the first nipple piercing in his gay motorcycle club, the New York Motorbike Club. Later Jim would move to Colorado to join up with another club who would then experiment with some of the most extreme piercing techniques available today including that of the genital piercing. It was not until 1973 when Jim Ward moved to West Hollywood and met up with Fakir Musafar and Doug Malloy when the basic techniques and equipment used in today’s piercing would be developed.
In 1978 the first body piercing studio, the Gauntlet would be opened by Jim Ward with the help of Doug Malloy’s company, Muzak in West Hollywood. It only took a couple years before the trend caught on and by the early 1980’s there were piercing studios located all across the US and Europe.
The rest is of course history and today the concept of body piercing continues to evolve and all the time people are experimenting with new type of body piercing and piercing combinations. Whether this is just a simple ear piercing, or a piercing of the arms, legs or even genital areas, body piercing is growing in popularity.