How to Gauge Your Ears

Wearing big earrings is in and many men and women do not have an ear piercing size large enough to adjust earrings with bigger posts. An ideal option is to gauge your ears and make the hole size sufficiently big to accommodate the posts of desired earrings. The following account briefly describes all the steps on how to gauge your ears yourself. Perform them and get yourself a trendy and stylish look.

How to Gauge Your Ears Properly

Step 1
Purchase a pair of earrings. Make sure that they are made of gold, silver or stainless steel. Gold and silver are inert elements, and so reduce the risk of reacting with atmospheric substances and causing trouble to your ear lobes. Stainless steel is not porous, and therefore does not accumulate micro-organisms and dirt that may cause infection. To add to these benefits, gold, silver and stainless steel are heavy substances. Their heavy weight assists the process of stretching or ear gauging. While buying earrings, you should go for the one whose post is a size bigger than your ear piercing size. Majority of the ear piercings are done with 0.8 or 0.5 mm gauge needle. Suppose, your present gauge is 0.8 mm, then buy an earring pair with 1.0 mm gauge.

Step 2
The next step is to wash your hands and ear lobes thoroughly with an antibacterial soap. Rinse the ear lobes well and pat dry. Massage your ear piercing with olive or coconut oil for a couple of minutes. You may use a water-based lubricant for massaging the ear lobes. Soak the ear piercing in warm water. This will open up the piercing and soften the skin in the ear lobe.

Step3
Cover the post of the earrings with a bigger gauge with olive oil, coconut oil or water-based lubricant. Take one earring and insert it gently into the ear piercing. You will find it difficult to slide this larger ring in your piercing. But you need to take it easy. Try to go very slowly, enabling your ear piercing to accommodate the earring with a larger gauge. Perform this process of inserting new earrings carefully to avoid tearing and bleeding of ear lobes.

Step 4
Once inserted, both the earrings and ear earlobes need to be kept clean and well-sterilized. Make it a point to clean the earrings and earlobes with an anti-bacterial soap twice a day. You may develop ear lobe soreness as it heals and adjusts to the bigger hole size. Use a cotton ball dipped in an antiseptic lotion to remove the crusts formed on the affected skin. You may apply a solution of filtered water and table salt on the ear piercings. It helps in cleansing and keeping micro-organisms away. The entire process of increasing the ear piercing size including the healing process may take up to a month. The time period actually depends upon the rate of healing of the skin that is different for different individuals.

In case you experience excessive pain, reddening, swelling or bleeding that do not go away even after 2 or 3 days, take off the thicker earrings and pay a visit to a medical practitioner. Otherwise, continue wearing the same to gauge your ears. You may find people advising you to go to a professional and punch a larger hole by removing a plug of skin. But this won't be a wise idea as this will not allow you to get back to a small hole size in future if you wish to. Therefore, go for ear gauging as you may bring your ear piercing size back to original by stopping to wear earrings with thicker posts.