A Comprehensive Guide to Facial Piercings

Call it ’90s nostalgia, call it work-from-home freedom, call it pandemic give-no-fucks energy, but whatever the reasons may be, more and more of us are choosing to compliment ear piercings with facial adornments. 

“Tattoos and piercings are becoming more culturally accepted, and people are discovering that there shouldn’t be a negative connotation to it,” says Jim Kelly, head piercer at Banter by Piercing Pagoda. “If you have an eyebrow piercing, and you can do your job better than someone without an eyebrow piercing, you should still get the job.” At Banter, the most popular facial piercings of the moment are eyebrows and septums, which Kelly ties to the wave of nineties nostalgia we’ve already noted in hair, makeup, and even nail art.

Your friendly neighborhood piercers are happy to comply with requests from nostril to tongue — just don’t ask them to tell you exactly how much a piercing is going to hurt. “How we register discomfort has so much more to it than where a piercing falls on our bodies,” says Bethrah Szumski, owner of Virtue & Vice, a body piercing and permanent makeup studio in Atlanta. 

Meet the experts: 

Personal factors like how you’re feeling emotionally or how well you slept last night will have an effect on how comfortable — or not — a piercing feels. But if you keep reading, you’ll discover the most and least painful piercings aren’t necessarily what you might expect. 

Before making an appointment, Szumski suggests searching for potential piercers on safepiercer.org, the membership database of the Association of Professional Piercers. Be sure also to seek out the portfolio of your potential piercer, both to confirm that they work often on the area of the body you’re looking to pierce, and to make sure your styles align. 

Once you’ve tracked down the perfect piercer for you, go forth — with this facial piercing guide in tow, of course.