My Findings on Body Art and Modification

In August of 2008 a thirteen year old girl walked into a Panama Beach Department store and was able to get an upper ear cartilage piercing with no parental permission. While this is not good that minors are able to get pierced as they please in this store that is not the issue.

The girl claims she that only was she not asked for parental permission, but was also not told how to care for the new piercing. By the time she returned home from her vacation she had an infection so bad she had to spend two days in the hospital and has permanent ear disfiguration. Her family is trying to sue the store for medical expenses and damages for the girl’s pain and suffering that apparently she still deals with to this day when she looks at her ear and cries.

But, besides for piercing a minor without parental consent, the store should not be responsible for covering her medical expenses and giving her money to ease her emotional suffering. While she was only thirteen at the time, she still should have recognized something was wrong when an infection started to develop, her parents should have also noticed. For a two-day hospital stay the infection and the pain must have taken some time to develop. I feel bad for her but she should not get money out of the store due to be young and foolish.

More information and pictures of the “horribly” disfigured ear (it is really just a small bend in the cartilage) can be found here.

Hearing aids are usually seen as devices for those with hearing impairments and are not one bit fashionable for people. As technology advances they are becoming less and less visible. But also, instead of making hearing aids less noticeable there are also ideas for combining them with other things. As the young become old, hearing aids are adapting to have the potential to be more than just something that you rely on to correctly hear sound.

This new idea puts a hearing aid in an ear stretching plug and has a tiny wire running into the wearer’s ear. Some people might think this is crazy, why would someone with hearing complications, someone who is most likely older, want to stretch their ears? But as younger generations who practice ear stretching get older and develop hearing issues they are not going to want to seem so old. Modern technology is allowing them to hold on to their youth and their ability to hear. Besides 40 is the 20 and hearing complications will be more likely to develop then. Also, for young people with hearing impairments, this will be something fun for them and they will feel more included than ever and can be called freaks like everyone else by those who disagree with ear stretching.

For more information check it out here at Design Studios