BME: Body Modification Ezine

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Category: ModBlog

  • 10 Ridiculous Piercing Patents

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    The patent offices are overflowing with silly, ill-conceived inventions on all subjects, and the world of body piercing is no exception. It seems like there is a long list of people who are not experienced with piercing personally, but have seen it and decided their great intellect can contribute various creations that would improve the life of a pierced person. Unfortunately, these ideas are the sort of ideas that make sense to the outsider, but are complete nonsense to those who actually know something about piercing firsthand. Below are ten of the more ridiculous piercing patents I’ve come across in my research.

    sillypatent-US4353370
    “Medicated Ear Rods”
    Patent 4353370, Filed Nov 17, 1980

    The idea behind this invention is an earring where the end is hollow and full of a cleaning solution, with the rod designed to “provide a constant supply of cleaning solution to the earlobe to prevent infection of the ear hole.” As piercers know, one of the most common reasons for complications in healing is overcleaning — can you imagine what would happen to a piercing that was being cleaned non-stop? Best case this patent would keep a piercing in a perpetually unhealed state… worst case is far less pleasant.

    sillypatent-US6047209
    “Method and apparatus for maintenance of pierced orifices”
    Patent 6047209, Filed Apr 2, 1999

    Many of the patents are obsessed with overcleaning. This one unfortunately I can see easily making its way into stores. It’s basically a tool for injecting cleaning solution into a piercing via either a dull syringe or a ring with holes around its circumference. At first glance this might seem like a good idea, but the problem is that not only does it encourage over-attention to cleaning, but it requires the the person fully remove the healing piercing to clean it. This constant removal, agressive cleaning, and replacement cycle would actually result in slowing down healing far more than speeding it up. The only case in which I can imagine this having any value is in cleaning a severely infected piercing that has been permanently removed.

    sillypatent-US6358221
    “Disposable cleaning apparatus for pierced human body parts”
    Patent 6358221, Filed Aug 17, 1999

    Another silly cleaning concept that makes the same mistake as the previous one — requiring the jewelry be removed over and over — this one is actually a patent for a portable kit comprised of the container, the solution, and what is best described as “piercing floss”. It’s literally a dull sewing needle and some thread.

    sillypatent-US6408851
    “Method and device for holding a tongue in a forward position”
    Patent 6408851, Filed Oct 1, 1999

    This one gives me nightmares! It’s a device “for pulling a tongue forward thereby preventing obstruction to the flow of air during sleep or an emergency.” That is, it’s a retainer or mouthguard-type device that hooks onto the teeth, and a variety of attachment designs that let you hook the tongue piercing to it. During sleep, this would be extremely unpleasant and almost certainly damage the piercing. During an emergency, there are better and certainly less complex methods to accomplish the same goal — especially considering that this aparatus blocks the mouth quite effectively in and of itself, potentially complicating the emergency.

    sillypatent-US6978639
    “Tongue jewelry clip and method of wearing the same”
    Patent 6978639, Filed Apr 15, 2003

    This ridiculous piece of jewelry exists in two forms — pierced or non pierced. The non-pierced version is held in place by pressure, which would be incredibly uncomfortable, and both versions would unpleasant even without that pressure. The design completely immobilizes the front half of the tonge, making legible speech virtually impossible. Clearly this is yet another patent submitted by a person who has never tried their own invention.

    sillypatent-US8006516
    “Tongue and mouth stud for dispensing a substance”
    Patent 8006516, Filed Oct 31, 2003

    This is a design for a tongue barbell that’s filled with “a substance such as a chemical, breath freshener, pleasant flavor, or medication”, which it then releases either into the mouth, or into the tongue itself, via holes in the bar and/or bead. Another idea that seems clever at first glance, but that anyone with experience can tell you isn’t going to work. In addition to almost certainly irritating the tongue, the holes would be almost instantly plugged up with plague (and perhaps bacteria) and become quite disgusting. Just have a mint instead.

    sillypatent-US20050199003
    “Nonpiercing jewelry that presents pierced effect”
    Publication US 2005/0199003 A1, Filed Mar 10, 2004

    Yeah, because that’s what piercings look like. Can you imagine how foolish a person would look with this pretend piercing? And more importantly, can you imagine how unpleasant it would be to wear this in your mouth? It’s nuts.

    sillypatent-US20070163603
    “Tongue retention device”
    Publication US 2007/0163603 A1, Filed Jan 18, 2006

    Another extremely unpleasant device intended to combat sleep apnea and snoring by combining a mouth guard with a device that attaches to a tongue piercing. Again, I cannot imagine anything more awful than using this, and I don’t think it would do wonders for the health of your tongue piercing. It would stop snoring though — as a side effect of stopping you from sleeping. Maybe it has applications as some sort of BDSM fetish toy.

    sillypatent-US20120324949
    “Self-Expanding Dilation Plug”
    Publication US20120324949 A1, Filed Jun 20, 2012

    I was split on including this because it’s the sort of thing that looks like a great idea at first glance (and was actually invented by a Colorado tattooist). However, as we learned when people started trying “constant pressure” stretching using silicone jewelry, the body does not respond well to constant pressure. It routinely results in horrific tears in the ear. In addition, the ear when stretching is extremely sensitive to uneven pressure. This design is super-cool on so many levels and many of us with stretched ears have tossed around similar concepts, but in the real world, this concept has proved itself to be a terrible idea.

    sillypatent-USD490521
    “Cleaning device for pierced openings”
    Patent D490521, Filed Mar 28, 2003

    It’s a stick — the bundle of grapes is the handle, and you’re supposed to stick the rod into a piercing hole to clean it. You can really patent something like this?

  • Textural Work In Scarification

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    About two months ago Wayne Fredrickson of Zodiac Tattoo Studio in Moreno Valley, CA did this scar of an ammonite fossil. I like the way the design leaves out the edges of the shell, but instead focuses on the texture of the shell. The resultant effect reminds me of a textural rubbing of a fossil, and seems especially well suited to the scarification artform.

    texture-ammonite

    In terms of building up a tactile texture landscape, I’m also reminded of this scar that Iestyn of London’s Divine Canvas (divine-canvas.com). It’s about four years old in this photo.

    texture-sphere

  • Two Mouths, One Tongue

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    In the depraved theme of the previous post, I caption this picture of Diego and his massive stretched piercings and eyeball tattoos: “Don’t you hate it when you stick your tongue in the wrong hole by accident?”

    tongueoops

  • Suspension Daisy Chain

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    This photo (in which I see Marc of Little Swastika and Roland, Oli, and Ralf of Visavajara) of a circular ring of people doing the suspension hook piercing of the person in front of them by being pierced by the one behind them is totally the suspension version of a daisy chain. And I’m not talking about the innocent sort…

    daisy-chain

  • Erl Van Aken, RIP (1939 – Jan 17, 2013)

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    I’m sorry for waiting longer than I should have to write this; after the recent deaths of other body modification figures like ManWoman and Stalking Cat it’s difficult to have to follow those up with the loss of another significant body modification pioneer. Unfortunately I must write that Erl Douglas Van Aken II (see Erl on the BME wiki and his web page) passed away at his home after a richer life than anyone could ask for.

    Erl was born in Brewer, Maine, and then moved to California at age four where he grew up in Orange County, a region he characterized as having “a very narrow band of perception, and being a person of ‘different’ thinking, not subject to peer pressure, I was not well… tolerated.” Always forward thinking, in the early sixties he worked in the space program at NASA, Bell Labs, JPL, and similar institutions where he worked on some of the first satellite programs, as well as Mercury, Gemini, and the Apollo program where he contributed significantly to the rover (moon buggy) — “in that sense I’m on the moon,” he said.

    Wanting to explore a wider range of expression and not really fitting in to an increasingly “professional” environment, Erl left to become a multi-media artist, working in nearly every medium — as well as doing a lot of “motorcycle riding and hell raising during this period as well — you know, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll”, a dangerous lifestyle that would nearly cost him his life “on more than one occasion”. In the mid-90s (by which point he was a well-established body modification icon already) he began modelling for fine art, which lead to him joining the Screen Actors Guild (usually credited as Erl Van Douglas, although many of his non-speaking roles are uncredited, such as his 1996 appearance in The Cable Guy, the first movie I remember seeing him in — and my favorite thing about that movie). Lance Richlin, an artist who recently painted a series of portraits of Erl wrote me saying,

    “Erl was no ordinary man. He was a Mystic. He had deep insight. The body modification was literally only the surface of the man. I didn’t even notice it after the first few encounters. When he was younger, he was a dangerous fellow. But he became a very gentle and compassionate man in old age.”

    Although body modification was only a small part of a much more complex personality, Erl’s role in the world of body modification was significant. While the name has fallen out of fashion in favor of the anatomical moniker “bridge piercing”, for a long time “Erl” was what the piercing was called (as in “I’d like to get an Erl piercing”), as Erl was the first person known to wear it (done for him by The Gauntlet). Erl wasn’t only an early piercing and tattoo fan and innovator — he was also one of the first heavy body modification enthusiasts whose focus was significantly aesthetic. There have always been heavy mod practitioners, but the vast majority until the mid-nineties were doing it in private, almost exclusively in a sexual realm. Erl on the other hand was not only one of the first people in the West to explore surgical body mods on an artistic level, but also to do it “out”, sharing his love for it with those around him — for example, his radical and way, way, ahead of its time bipedical flap procedure was documented in Body Art magazine. Thereby he influenced many of the early body modification artists, as well as inspiring other serious enthusiasts, and changed culture more than he probably realized.

    On the left, a recent painting of Erl by artist Lance Richlin (visit him at lancerichlin.com), and on the right, a pre-firing sculpture of Erl by Nicholas Mestanas (visit him on Facebook) — note that the piece includes Erl’s chest implants and bipedical flap (the artist was planning on adding the piercings post-firing).

    erl1t erl2t

    Finally a few photoshoot images from Erl’s webpage — visit justerl.com to explore more.

    erlphoto1t erlphoto2t erlphoto3t

    Whether the name “Erl piercing” returns or falls out of our language, Erl’s pioneering exploration of body modification and the impact it had on popular culture lives on in hundreds of thousands of people’s lives — to say nothing of the myriad of other positive ways he touched those around him.

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