Rook Piercing Experience

Happy birthday to me!

    For my 19th birthday this year, I decided I wanted to get a piercing. I debated between a double helix, forward helix, tragus and a rook. After like three weeks of debating I finally decided on my right rook. I did so much research- this includes journals, blogs, videos, forums, etc. I wanted to know everything about the rook piercing specifically and elastic cartilage piercings in general.

    Everybody's first question when getting a piercing is, "does it hurt". I can't tell you if it will hurt for you, but it didn't hurt for me one bit. I felt some pressure and heard LOTS of crunching, but there wasn't any sharp or pinching pain. I'm not really sure why it didn't hurt.. Lots of adrenaline? The extreme crunchiness distracted me? I had anticipated so much pain that the actual pain was nothing? You would think that a huge needle going through a fairly thick piece of cartilage would give me some sort of wave of pain...

On a pain scale from 1-10, I would rate it a 1.

    My piercer was awesome and totally knew what she was doing. So, the needle was all the way through in like .63 seconds and she had the jewelry threaded through in 1.5 seconds. So in total the piercing was over in under 5 seconds.

    I chose to get white opal colored gems on a surgical steel curved barbell. The gems tend to look mostly light pink, but I still like them! I was told that a barbell was better for healing than a captive bead ring because the rings tend to get caught a lot more.

    As of now, I'm cleaning it 3-5 times every day and it seems to be working out fairly well for me. I haven't had much crusties (sorry, gross word), any bleeding and basically any problems so far.

Here is the swelling progression.

                                   1                                                                                                  2

34

     It didn't start swelling til about 30 hours after I got it pierced. It wasn't too bad. The swelling went up and down for a couple days. Most of the swelling came after I cleaned around the jewelry. It's in such a weird spot that it's almost impossible to clean it without moving the jewelry! Also, your initial jewelry should always be long enough to accommodate swelling, so that's why the barbell looks so long.

 Here's what it looks like now- 6 days after! 

VERY minimal swelling and very low pain!

The actual area of the piercing itself doesn't hurt that much, I was more sore in the helix area (which most people refer to as "the cartilage". Even though most of your ear is cartilage.....)

I'm planning on doing an update after 1 to 2 months of having it pierced.

Do you have any unique piercings?

rook piercing pain, what does a rook piercing feel like, how to clean a rook piercing, rook piercing experience, rook, rook piercing, rook piercing healing process, how long does it take a rook piercing to heal, is it normal for a rook piercing to swell, why is my rook so swollen, why does it hurt on my helix when my rook was pierced,