You should get a full explanation of or find out about each of the following:
1) Check with your local Health Board, to see if the shops are up to code or have had any violations against them in the past!
2) All precautions taken by the piercer(s) and staff at the shop, to ensure your complete safety from any contamination including Blood Born Pathogens.
3) Ask for a tour of the shop, including the sterilization area, find out about their sterilization techniques and if spore testing is done per month. Ask about their knowledge of the human anatomy, and how they learnt their techniques. Did they apprentice under skilled supervision, for at least a year or two. Or by books, seminars, short courses, and videos; none are the correct way.
4) Aftercare support, do they have any in place (if you have a problem, what will they do to help, are they concerned about your healing or taking your money!
5) Verify that, age of consent, is checked (in Ontario it is currently 18 years). Most places will have you sign a Release Form, this is a legal document so you will need to be of age or you will need parental permission (a parent's signature is required).
In some of the United States, if you misrepresent your age you can be charged as a juvenile.
Here is some further information so that you have a better understanding of what to look for:
Sterile vs Clean
The goal of clean field procedures is to interrupt the chain of contamination. In other words, we set a limit, saying, contamination ends here! Isolate that contamination so the reservoirs are removed from the environment to protect subsequent clients.
To achieve this, fresh materials are used with each client, where possible, and they are disposed of afterward. Where impractical, as with tools used in the piercing procedure, the tools are scrubbed, repackaged and re-sterilized after each client. Even the working surfaces must be refreshed after each client. In addition, disposal of the waste material and storage of contaminated items must be controlled to prevent that contamination from coming back to a client.
Sterile vs Clean
Calling something ‘sterile’ implies a guarantee that pathogenic organisms are absent. No such guarantee can be made in any aesthetics or body piercing studio. If a thing has been sterilized, it is free of pathogens only until it has been exposed to them again. At the moment of exposure, it can no longer be considered ‘sterile’.
For this reason, we consider the area we work in as a ‘Clean Field’, not ‘Sterile Field’. Although many of the same principles apply, there is no guarantee of an absence of pathogens in the working field. By the same token, if your studio describes their technique as 'Sterile Field', they do not understand what they are saying, and probably have little understanding of what they are doing.
Chain of Contamination
The concept of chain of contamination is simple enough that most people consider it almost self-evident when explained, yet it is the most difficult concept for most to grasp and understand. Simply stated, anything which touches something contaminated is itself contaminated.
The primary source of contamination in a body piercing environment is the blood of a client. Following Universal Precautions, we assume from the outset that blood is a source of infection. Since blood contamination does not have to be visible to be present, we make the simple assumption that anything which comes in contact with the site of a piercing has been contaminated. Thus gloves, needles, body jewelry, gauze, swabs, tools etc. all become secondary sources (reservoirs) of contamination. Anything touched by these objects are, in turn, reservoirs, and so on.
Universal Precautions
In the past, medical personnel would take precautions to protect themselves and to prevent the transmission of disease only when there was evidence of the disease, and the precautions taken were specific to the disease suspected. With the increased incidence of insidious diseases (diseases which may be infectious without any overt symptoms) the medical community has moved from Specific Precautions to adopt a more rigorous protection philosophy, called Universal Precautions. The basic tenet of Universal Precautions is quite simple: everybody is presumed to be diseased. Consequently, precautions are universally implemented to protect the practitioner, and to prevent the transmission of disease.
These precautions protect three things: the practitioner, the client, and the environment to which they are exposed, in that order. Above all, the body piercer must be protected. Because they are in contact with many clients, contamination of the practitioner increases the probability of the spread of disease.
Next the client must be protected. Naturally they have a right to expect that the body piercing procedure will not place them at risk. Finally, the environment must be protected to ensure that no pathogens remain in the working area to later place the practitioner or a subsequent client at risk.
Should a situation arise where contamination is unavoidable, the piercer should allow the environment to become contaminated while protecting the client and themselves. The environment can always be cleaned up after the fact.
For example, if there is unexpected bleeding from a client, the bleeding must be controlled. If this means grabbing gauze from a clean package with a contaminated glove, so be it. The package will be discarded afterward. In a body piercing situation, there are no conceivable circumstances which would justify a body piercer contaminating a client in order to protect themselves.
