We had our piercing aftercare wrong. Here is exactly what, and what it says now.

Short version: our aftercare pages were serving one set of instructions to all 48 piercing types. That is fine for a helix and wrong for a tongue, and in a couple of places it was wrong in a direction that could actually hurt someone. It has been rebuilt per anatomy. Here is the whole list, because you should be able to check what changed rather than take our word that it is better. **The tongue page was telling you to do impossible things.** Keep the original bandage on. Rinse it in the shower. Dry it "with clean paper towel or lowest-setting hair dryer." Sleep on a travel pillow. That last one even had "(ear piercings)" still sitting in the sentence — the template leaked its own note into the published page. None of that applies to a piercing inside your mouth. **One line was actively backwards.** Under What to Avoid we listed "oral contact on body piercings during healing (except lip/tongue piercings)" — which reads as: with a fresh tongue piercing, oral contact is fine. It is not. The APP says avoid oral sexual contact, including wet kissing, while it heals. That line is gone. **We never mentioned downsizing.** This is the one that matters most. Oral jewelry is fitted long on purpose to leave room for swelling. Once the swelling goes down, a piercer needs to fit you a shorter bar — leaving the long one in is what chips teeth and wrecks gums. The ADA reports tooth damage in 26% of tongue piercings and gum recession in up to half of lip piercings. It was not on our page at all. It is now, on every oral piercing page and in the healing check-in email. Related: our healing emails used to say "downsize at 6–8 weeks." There is no such deadline. The trigger is the swelling going down, which happens at completely different speeds for different people. A date is wrong early and wrong late, so we removed it and describe the condition instead. **Salt water.** 40 of our 48 piercing guides told you to soak in warm salt water. The Association of Professional Piercers stopped suggesting homemade salt mixes — they come out far too strong and dry the piercing out. Two of our articles even published a recipe. All corrected to sterile saline wound wash, 0.9% sodium chloride, nothing else. And no, that is not contact lens saline or nasal spray. **The hair dryer.** Not in APP guidance for any piercing, anywhere. Gone from all 48 pages. **Fifteen pages were missing a section entirely.** The "Who Should Do This" practitioner-safety block never rendered on any facial piercing — nostril, septum, eyebrow, bridge. A single mismatched word in the code meant it silently resolved to nothing. Nothing errored, the section was just absent, and it had been that way the whole time. Fixed. **"APP Certified" is not a thing.** We used that phrase on the studio directory, on a filter, and in an article headline. The Association of Professional Piercers is a membership body and says plainly that it does not license or certify piercers. Membership means real things — sterilisation standards, bloodborne pathogen training, an autoclave that gets independently spore-tested every month — but it is not a certification, and it does not assess anyone's piercing skill. We had an article claiming APP members are "specifically trained in anatomical assessment." They are not. Everything now says "APP Member", and where a studio has ticked that box, the page tells you we have not independently checked it. Ask to see the current card. **On genital piercings we now show a disagreement instead of hiding it.** The APP says you can resume sex when you feel ready, with barriers and gently. The NHS says wait until it is healed. Those are both credible sources and they do not agree. Rather than quietly pick one, both are on the page. Ask your piercer, and ask your doctor. Every aftercare page now links out to the APP's own guidance so you can check us. --- A few other things fixed today that are not aftercare: - **The studio directory was inventing facts about real businesses.** Every unclaimed listing showed a "Waitlist" badge. Those 7,314 shops never told us anything — we imported them from public business data — but a stored "no" and a "never asked" looked identical in our database, and the page printed the "no". If you saw a shop marked Waitlist and did not bother calling, that is on us. Unclaimed listings no longer make any availability claim. - **Claiming your studio was showing a $99 fee.** It has always been free — the code takes no payment — but the claim page displayed a fee, a non-refundable notice, and a "Proceed to Payment" button. If that put you off claiming your shop, please go and claim it. It costs nothing. - **Our merchant price was wrong on one page** ($29 where we bill $49). Corrected to what we actually charge. - **We removed claims we cannot back up.** We were saying clients "cancel less" and there are "fewer no-shows" with AI preview. We have not measured that, so we should not have said it. Our About page also called every studio here an "early adopter" — most are imported listings that have never heard of us, and calling that an endorsement was not honest. - **Privacy Policy and Terms are updated.** The Privacy Policy now actually describes what we do: age verification, the adult-content setting, that uploaded images are automatically scanned, and — the part you most deserve to know — that images flagged by that scan are looked at by a human before anything happens to them. Also licence documents, private messages, moderation records, and the healing tracker, none of which were mentioned before. The Terms previously banned "sexually explicit" content outright, which would have outlawed most piercing portfolios on a piercing site; they now describe the actual policy and publish the enforcement ladder that goes with it. None of this was found by a member hitting a problem, and I would rather it stay that way. If you spot something on the site that looks wrong — especially in aftercare — say so in this thread and it gets checked properly, against sources, not just tidied up.