Be welcome

Dear visitor, this blog is written by the band Other Day. We got our ears pointed and finally decided to share our experiences and feelings with you, because we realized the problems in finding all information about this procedure gathered on one site in the internet. We hope you'll enjoy this blog and find some information you're looking for.

If you have any questions that aren't answered here, please feel free to contact us on Facebook or via comments.

Please feel welcome to our dreamworld.

Day 13

wohooo, our stitches grow out of our ears. Actually it's just the first stitch at the top of the point. It looks like a milk tooth which is just hanging on a little bit flesh. You can also move them if you put your finger on the outgrowing stitches.

Day 10 and reactions of other people

Hey everybody,
today we compared pics of our ears from day ten with day one. It's unbelievable how our ears changes during this days. We put the pics next to each other:









you can see how good our ears already look... no more swelling and the transections are now just really thin lines, they look "closed" and it seems that they can't get an infection anymore. Anyway, we still use H2Ocean two times a day.

Today we'd like to talk about reactions again. We recognized a lot of different effects. Generally it seems to polarise people. Some love it and others think it's stupid but hey, you can't be liked by everybody. It's just important that you feel comfortable and that's what we do with this ears, so we don't mind what others think.
The majority of our friends react in a positive way (as we already mentioned)
People who don't know about our ear pointing wondering sometimes what happened with us because they see the stitches and the tape. Some of them thought we had an accident or that we had to make our ears smaller because they might have been to big before the surgery. Ha ha. Such reactions are always funny :) By the way, strangers don't recognize our ears immediately. They have to be with us for some minutes, 'cause you just recognize it if you see our faces sideways. That's why our ears aren't a problem at work... nobody has to do with us long enough to recognie. Just sometimes people stare a little bit but don't dare asking us what's wrong with our ears.

Of course, there are also stupid and rude people. Today some girl with purple hair (!!!) that seemed to be "a member of a upper social class" (sorry, we don't want to be mean do anyone, but we can't descripe her with other words) shouted "Oh, Halloween", when we passed by but it seemed that it was just because of our appereance, the clothes, the hair etc. 'cause it's impossible that she recognized our ears from such a distance. Another bad reaction was a woman in a waiting room. Obviously she was in her thirties and her son sat next to her with a IQ-test-book in his hands. While one of us was waiting there for the doctor her son recognized the pointed ears and said to his mom "Look over there, pointed ears" in a fascinated way. You want to know what she answered? "So you better learn for school, so you woun't get a freak like this." Well, we don't want to moan about how rude, intolerant and narrow-minded people are nowadays. It always makes us sad that people can't imagine that it's possible to look strange and be smart at the same time.... poor people.

But there have been really sweet reactions too. For example there was a litlle boy in the train. He ran through the rail car and beheld one of us. He stared and ran away as he was recognized. He went back to his parents and his younger sister and told them that he has seen a very pretty person at the end of the rail car. Then he wanted to show this person to his sister. Awww, how sweet he was.

So if you think about getting your ears pointed, don't worry about reactions. There will be always people that aren't pleased by your look. Don't care about reactions of narrow-minded people. We also read in the internet that people think it's a job-killer but be honest, a lot of us have enough hair to cover up pointed ears if it's necessary for a job. And to mention the "pain pevert" theme... NO, JUST BECAUSE SOMEBODY HAS POINTED EARS HE ISN'T KEEN ON PAIN!!!Just because a lot of people seem to be a wimp when it comes to pain, others aren't perverts! Girls with silicone boobs also aren't called pain pervert and probably the days after this surgery are filled with more pain than getting pointed ears. Also getting a baby seems to be more painful.

Day 07 - washing your hair

Can't believe that we have our pointed ears for already one week! As all the days before our ears still don't hurt, instead of this the itching during the healing process already started but it gives us the good feeling that our ears will look fabulous soon. Everyday you can see small changes: our ears aren't swollen anymore and the yellow hematomas are almost gone, so you can already imagine their pretty shape:





As you can see, we still didn't removed all the dried blood from our ears 'cause we're still afraid of abeting infections. Furthermore people are more scared if they see the dried blood, ha, ha.
As far as we can estimate them with the stitches, the blood and the tape, it seems that Steve did a really good job and gave us the ears we wanted.


Today we'd like to write about washing your hair. Yes, it sucks. So the best thing would be if you have a person that can help you at least for the two weeks your ears aren't allowed getting wet. Especially the hairsections next to your ears can hardly handled alone. For you and your hair wash assistant cups are an adequate tool because they give you a better control about the amount of water you use than a shower head (don't know about your shower heads but our one needs a huge amount of water to work and that makes a broadening water jet). As we already mentioned in "Aftercare" dry shampoo is good to bridge and expand the time until the next hair-wash-day, so you don't have to go through this annoying procedure too much times. If you have the possibility to wear an undercut, do it ;) because as you can imagine for Sad it's much easier to wash and especially rinse his hair alone.
Drying your hairs is also difficult, 'cause you can't wrap a towel around you head without pushing on your ears. So just press your hair into the towel, scrub a bit and maybe use a hair blower and comb your hair back to avoid you wet hair touching your ears.

We wish you good luck ;)

Day 05 and where you can find more information

As you can imagine, still everything's still fine. Our ears sometimes hurt a bit but it's not that much and always just for some minutes so we didn't take any pain killers till now.
We'd like to share some links of other interesting internet pages which contain pics and/or experience.

Wildcat


a blog with two entries about ear pointing:

Day 04 and sleeping positions

Hi there,
still there's everything all right with our ears. They started getting yellow at the beginning of the helix which connects your ear with your head. No, it's not hepatitis B and we're also not becomming Simpson characters ;) it seems to be the rest of a effusion.
Just have a look what I'm talking about:


                      as you can see, especially Sad's skin in front of the ear became yellow

Aftercare didn't changed till now. We're using H2Ocean 2-3 times a day. In the morning we clean the whole ear, the other two times just the points. We still keep hair away as good as possible. Till now there aren't any infections and we guess there woun't be onfections in the future. The dried blood will keep the wounds closed, so we don't remove the blood till it'll fall off by itself akthough the blood make our ears look a bit creepy. It's Halloween soon, so the look is ok ;)

Finally we also got used to the strange sleeping positions. So we'd like to talk about this:
as you know, you aren't allowed to lie in your ear 'cause the pressure could damage everything and it's possible that your ears woun't adhere well. Useful for sleeping are so called head rests, pillows with the shape of an "u". You can use them in two different ways: on the one hand you can sleep in a more sitting-like position (if you don't have a bed which allows you to adjust the upper part of your bed to a higher level you can also use big pillows to lie more straight) and put them behind your neck. This is the way they're normally used. But on the other hand you can use them instead of other pillows. So if you prefer for sleeping somehting like the fetus-position you can just lie on a head rest and put your ear into the hole and woun't put any pressure on them. You just have to make sure you woun't move a lot during the night so you're not accidentally lieing on your fresh ears.
It's also possible to use your normal pillows and lie them around your head with a "v" or "u" shape, so just your head lies on them and your ears "floats".
Another sweet idea is to make you own pillows. As sweet, but German, tutorial you can find at Natron&Soda.We'll make such pillows as soons as our stitches will be taken out, 'cause we want to be gentle to our ears for some more weeks.
The last possible thing we tried is lieing just on your arm. It's the same like shaping pillows into a "v".

Day 02 and aftercare

Today it was time to wear our ears the first time in public 'cause we had to go out for buying some food. Because it was raining we had to use an umbrella and what happened? Because of a very strong gust of wind the umbrella hits one of our ears... this fucking hurts! Fortunately it doesn't seem as anything is damaged... there's no blood and the pain stopped after some minutes.
When we were out there weren't any recognizable reactions by unknown people, they were starring like always. Friends and family members, we met on our way, reacted in a good way and were really interested in the details of the pointing procedure. Everybody was worried because of the pain which still isn't existing. Cause everybody knows that we're strange people, nobody wonders about this ear pointing that much, ha ha.

Because nothing special happened we want to write about aftercare this time:
we were given two H2Ocean-sprays, which include a saline solution that you can also put on fresh piercings etc. We're told to put it on our ears 2-3times per day, even more if we want to. You can also wash them out with antibacterial soap but better ask your bodymod artist what treatment he recommends you.

If your ears are freshly pointed it's also better to tie up your hair 'cause if they get into your wound, they will may cause discomfort. It's also a good idea to prevent your ears from getting too wet (this is bad for the fixing tape and the stitches as well), so if you really have to wash your hair, let somebody help you. Better use a cup or something like this to rinse your hair, 'cause you can controll the amount and direction of the water better than using the shower head. Steve recommended us also little shower caps which just have the size of your ear. Usually you can buy them in barber shops, maybe also in your local drug store or online. They look like granny shower caps but are smaller and they're normally used to protect your ears during colouring your hair.Using dry shampoo is also a good advice. Just cover your ears to avoid the powder touching your wound and spray it into your hair. They will look like they're freshly washed.

Everybody with common sense should be able to think about all the other things, which could help your ear during healing: don't carry around heavy things during the first days, 'cause your wound could rupture again. This is why you shouldn't overdo with moving (don't run up the stairs into a higher floor, don't overdo sport (better stop it for the first days)), no solarium, no sauna, sleep a lot, eat healthy and drink enough, no alcohol at least two days before and after the procedure!!!! and don't take painkillers which could thin your blood (no acetylsalicylic acid like in Aspirin) so better use painkillers that base on ibuprofen or paracetamol. But please contact you local pharamcist which painkiller he would recommend you 'cause some painkillers can cause stomachache and others work better on fever than on killing pain.

The stitches of your modification will be taken out in 14-17 days (it depends on the healing process). Usually your bodymod artist is responsible for that. Because Steve is already back in the US and Sandra's Shop is five hours away, we get help from one of our friends. She is working as a nurse, so she will surely be able to take out stitches and remove the tape. Steve said us, that it's really important to remove the tape from the back of our ears first and to pull it to the front side, not in the opposite direction because this would stress the freshly healed ears too much.

All in all you see that it's not that hard to take care for freshly pointed ears. If you are unsure about handling them it should be self-evident for your local bodymod artist or the piercer etc. that hosted your chosen bodymod artist to help you.

Day 01

We have no idea what's going on with our ears but they're feeling so incredible good. We read a lot of spine-chillers about the days after the ear pointing, so we expected hell on earth, 'cause even Sandra warned us before the following days. But we're feeling fine, didn't take any painkillers. Our ears just hurt if we're running up the stairs too fast.
Today it's just like you had a really good party the day before, so we're feeling a bit tired and dizzy. Even sleeping is ok. Yes, we are scared of lieing on our fresh ears, so one of us sleeps in a more sitting position with a head rest, the other one forces his body not to turn during sleep what seems to work also pretty well.

Our ears look also really good and not that gory like some of the other ears we've seen in the internet:





As you can see, there's just a bit scab from dried blood (our ears bleeded a bit during our way home and during the night) and our ears were taped with some Hyperfix tape. Tape and stitches will stay at least for 14-17 days. Today we removed the dried blood, during this our ears felt relatively numb, maybe this is the reason for the lack of pain? It's also possible that the differences according painlevel and look in the first days are caused by the different techniques bodymod artists use for ear pointings.

Today we'll just take a rest and hope this will help our bodies.

Day 00

Sunday, 16th October, was the great day for our ear pointing by Steve Haworth and drove almost five hours to Sandras studio "Obscene pierce 'n ink" in Wesel to meet him. It was the last chance to meet him this year in Germany 'cause he was heading seminars during the BMXnet conference in Essen.

After eating delicious waffles and talking about all the formal stuff (are you hemophile etc.) it was time for Steve to mark our ears and to took a last picture of them to show us the before-and-after-effect. From now on everybody was wearing surgical masks... scary. Sandra, Steve and his cute assistant took great care of us during the whole procedure. Everybody was asking again and again if the pain is bearable and cleaned our ears and faces from the huge amount of blood. During this Steve also learned some German: "viel Blut" means "a lot of blood". Ha,ha, this was scary again. Interestingly Steve didn't want to cover our faces with the green medical plane which is used during surgeries to protect the area around from blood, because he wanted to see our faces to go sure the new shape of our ears and the direction of the point will fit to our faces.
There were also two "premieres" for Steve: first of all Sads cartilage. Steve said, he never had to deal with such a thick cartilage.... usually they are just one millimeter thick, but Sad's were about three millimeter. The second premier was the couple-theme: Steve said, that he never did a couple-ear-pointing, so he's really looking forward for awesome pics of our healed ears (like we are).

All we can say to the procedure: you will survive it. Some of the sounds (like cutting your flesh and cartilage) needs getting used to and the stitching part is the worst and hardest. Especially the first stitch which tighten your cartilage is painful, but a real elf knows no pain ;) All in all the stitching feels like you're getting pierced a lot of times 'cause that's, what the needle does. After the first ear, Niha-Cétas circulation was a bit weak, but dextrose helps surviving nearly everything ;) The whole procedure took approximately one hour per person, so that's a half hour per ear. The first minutes our ears hurt a lot. They felt hot, pulsating and they stinged. Espceially the place behind the ears hurt most, although nothing happened with this spot. It felt like you wear really tight sunglasses for a lot of hours. Also the transections hurt. For some minutes we were sure, that this is just some kind of foretaste on the pain which will stay for the next days. Strange to say this pain was gone after circa thirty minutes.

some pics of our freshly pointed and cleaned ears immediately after the procedure:
 

                                                    Niha-Céta's left ear



                                          Niha-Céta's right ear


                                                         Sad's left ear


                                                        Sad's right ear


Unforunately Steve had a lot more customers to treat, so there was just time for a short talk. He was really impressed by our promotion pics and is looking forward to our new ones for his gallery. As the adrenalin rush was gone we felt a bit tired. Fortunately a friend accompanied us to Wesel so he drove us back home and we were able to sleep a lot in the car.

Choosing the right artist for you

This post is about how important it is to choose the right bodymod artist for your ear pointing. Because tastes differ, there are a lot of different ear styles offered: ears can look more natural and Lord of the ring-like, in contrast to this, they can be also really pointy and unnatural looking. So first of all decide wether you like the one or the other look.
After this, it's time for choosing the right artist for you. Choose an artist who is knowledgeable and experienced!!! It's always a good idea to read through different bodymod forums to get in touch with people the artist has worked on before, to get a sense on the quality of the artist's work. Another good way, that works also good for people who aren't that skilled in speaking English, is illustrating your ideas by using image editing software. We just took pictures of our ears and created the point that we want, sent it to the artists and asked them if they are able to create that kind of look.

with this pic we illustrated the point we'd like to have
                            
During gathering information we often read about the money-aspect, but please, don't choose your artist just because of the price. You just have one pair of ears and normally you point them just one time, so even a higher price shouldn't be that hard to pay. Never forget, that bodymod artists have to live from the money they earn and at least one person has to assist during the ear pointing.If they're pointed in the wrong way (related to your taste) it's hard for a second artist to create a new point... so all in all: getting the ears you want, should be your first goal, not saving money.

As already mentioned, tastes differ, so we can't say, who is the right artist for you, but we gathered the names, that are mentioned quite often in bodymod forums. A lot of them travel around the world, so maybe they also visit a shop near you. We gathered links to their homepages, but a lot of them also have a page in social networks, where you can contact them.

Steve Haworth
Lukas Zpira
Sampaa von Cyborg
Bruno
Russ Foxx
Howie
Efix Roy
Jonathan Martinez
Matias Tafel
Brian Decker
Emilio Gonzalez

Usually there are also shops in your own country that offer ear pointings. Because we're from Germany, we just know German shops, for example:
Deepmetal
Visavajara

We're sure this list isn't complete, it's just a list for a first impression on what is possible. Feel free to contact us, if you know about more places in your country.

The day before

So now there is only one day left till our ears will be pointed by Steve Haworth. It's a strange idea being never ever "normal" again.

                                           bye bye "normal" look....
                                              
We're living in really small town, so the response of our social environment will be interesting, especially reactions of unknown people. Even without pointed ears they're staring at us, but this is always a funny thing, 'cause we just stare and point at them till they 're embarrassed and look away.

We're a bit worried about the days after the ear pointing. After all we read, it seems to be a really painful time, but we're sure the result will be worth it.

Now we try to get some sleep and sweet dreams about pretty ears.