Faux Safety Pin Piercing Tutorial

Supplies needed:

• 2 Safety Pins
• A wire cutter, preferably something smaller so you can be precise
• An emery board or sand paper

*Please note that I'm not telling you to pierce your ears in a non-sterile environment, encouraging you to back down to the man or to use unidentified metals in your ears if they are sensitive!
*Warning!  Like a lot of earring, if safety pins are yanked hard enough, you may have damage to your ears! (I've seen some things O_O) Be careful.

Alrighty, let's get down to business.  A very well known piece of the alternate life style would the be Safety Pin Piercing.  This practice has passed down from our punk lords in the 70's to the grateful little boys and girls in this day & age in many different substyles and subcultures.  We love to use our shiny, shiny safety pins in our clothes, and many people have them in their skin.  Now, there are a few issues with this to some:

-If you work, you might not be able to rock your safety pin for the world to see.-If you're a minor, your parents might have a panic attack(like I caused my parents frequently)-You might not want to deal with the pain.-You might already have a piercing in the ideal spot,
or many others.
I, for one, already have my ears pierced, and thus cannot shove a safety pin though them.  There is an easy way to get around this!  Hear me out.  I have been reading this autobiography of Anthony Kiedis, and he was around this amazing time in punk, and it inspired me to do something I'd been thinking about for a long time.

Faux Safety Pin Piercings

Now, you might think this defeats the purpose of the thing, but some people simply can't, so if you can't, you do the best you can, and a huge rule in any substyle or subculture is that you don't have to dress the part every second of the day.  You can veg in your sweat pants blasting some music, taking off the bracelets and undoing your safety pins.
Let's get started.

    To start off, grab yourself a safety pin, it should be about medium in the scheme of things, just put it up to your ear to make sure it wouldn't be tight on your ear if it was in your piercing.

I wouldn't recommend using colored or coated safety pins, even with the least sensitive ears, because I don't know what kind of affect it would have, and it may irritate your skin.

 

Grab your wire cutters

Here I'm just using pliers with wire cutters at the base, as a lot do

   Now we're going to cut off the sharp end of the safety pin so we don't end up with a new unintentional hole in our ears.  You'll want to get as close to the edge as possible, because if you cut too far the head of the safety pin won't be able to catch it and you won't be able to close it.  You'll want to cut right at the base of where the safety pin slopes down to a point, you'll be able to see it where I circled in red at the close up.

P.S.! Before I forget, dispose of the piece you cut off IMMEDIATELY.  Put that thing in the trash, you do NOT want that stuck in your foot or something.

  Now that you've cut it, it will likely be a bit jagged and/or sharp.  Mine looked like this, and this was the second time I'd been through all the steps though I've done it a few more times now.

   In this step, you can use sand paper, an emery board or realistically anything abrasive enough to take an edge off of this.  I'm using an emery board only because pretty much all of my sand paper is covered in charcoal.
With this, it might take a while, and it might at least partially destroy your emery board, but it will make it fairly similar to the end of an earring wire. 

All you really need to do is hold it upright(or near upright) and scratch it back and fourth on your emery board, simple stuff.

You're done!  You might want to give it a rinse or a little wipe if they're a little dusty, but that's it.  Now you just have to repeat these steps with another one and you'll have a matching pair(if you want more than one). 

Aww yis

I like to put my safety pins in what would be considered backwards for a normal earring, meaning that I put the end of the safety pin through the back, closing it in the front, but you can do it any way you want

                                                     

Back to the beginning for our final photo-

                                       

PLEASE comment with any questions(or any thoughts what so ever)

Thank you!