A funny thing happened the other day. I tried putting a ring in one of my earlobe piercings. And I hated it.
I mostly like the look of plain titanium in piercings. It has a simple, clean and clinical appearance that I think looks good. But I do think that just three plain studs in my earlobe is maybe a little too plain. So I had always planned to replace the first stud with something else once it had healed. Nothing fancy: just a plain bcr or similar, at least for everyday wear, with the option to wear more interesting stuff occasionally as well.
So with my first lobe piercings eight months old and happily healed, I decided to try putting in a bcr to see how it looked. And it looked horrible! I can't really explain what was wrong, but somehow it just looked awful to me. It was a really instinctive, visceral revulsion. So I changed it back to the labret stud and started to rethink what to do with it.
And then I started to think about stretching. I have really mixed feelings about earlobe stretching. Sometimes it can look really nice, but other times it just looks weird, and I'm not quite sure what the difference is. I think one factor may be just size, but I think another is whether it's part of a particular 'look' that I can only describe as 'punk wuss'. It's kind of a scruffier, dressed-down version of the mid-00s emo style, with hints of 90s skater-punk as well and, with the utmost respect to anyone who has this style, I hate it. It just looks awful to me. And stretched earlobes (and other piercings) tend to be a key part of that.
But at the same time, I do think that stretched lobes can look great, particularly when they aren't all that huge. So I went and ordered myself a 'stretching kit', i.e. a set of glass plugs in varying sizes, from 1.6mm (14AWG) up to 10mm.
These arrived today, and so this afternoon I began my stretching journey with the 1.6mm plugs. My current goal is 6mm. This seems to be the smallest size in which most of the nice or interesting plugs are available. Going by the stretching guide in the r/stretched subreddit, I should be able to get there in just over a year. Current plan is to stay at 1.6mm until late June, then go to 2mm. Then 2.5mm at the beginning of August. 3mm at the start of October, then 4mm at the beginning of next year. 5mm at the beginning of April, then finally up to 6mm at the end of June.
At that point I can decide whether I want to keep stretching or whether to leave it there and start investing in a variety of interesting plugs to decorate the holes with. Or I could abandon the whole enterprise and hope that I haven't gone so far that my ears won't return to normal if I take the plugs out and leave them to recover.
The adventure begins here!
