New Trend in Piercing: The Frontal Lobe

Bertrand Werthing shows off his newfound cool as the poster boy for the Gauge, the latest in alternative piercing culture. - photo by Dan Zembrosky

Dan Zembrosky

A recent trend in body piercing has been puncturing through a whole new area of the human body: the frontal lobe. Body art specialists are calling the new piercing the Phineas P. Gauge after the man who daringly attempted to pierce his own lobe while working at a mining site during the mid-1800s.

“Phineas embodied everything our youth culture is about,” explained Bertrand “Razor” Werthing, a piercing practitioner, while piercing a fourteen-year-old girl’s nipple. “Gage self-performed piercing didn’t work out so well, but experts reported that, shortly after his accident, he changed from a responsible and hard-working man to an unpredictable, irreverent and self-centered egoist. The kids just can’t help but look up to him.”

The Gauge generally consists of a four- to six-inch rod driven through the top of the eye socket and up through to the top of the skull. “It’s a fairly safe procedure. The most important thing is keeping the wound clean, which means sanitizing it twelve times daily,” Werthing said. “And no showers. You wouldn’t want water getting in there; that could kill you.”

The largest trend associated with the piercing is the practice of attaching “extras” to the end of the bar. Youth are sporting decorations including the idea bulb, a medieval-type battling mace, an mp3 player, a polyphonic cell phone, and cleverly fashioned Jack in the Box antenna balls.

This new piercing is quickly becoming a huge fad among disaffected youth: “I used to think those big stretched out ear lobes, the ones you could fit a hot dog through, were really hot,” said Seattle teenager Donna Slater. “But, I mean, how pointless are those? They don’t really change who you are. But the Gauge, I mean, you just turn cool after one of those.” She added, “And they’re so damn hot.”

Despite warnings from professionals, who charge about $100 for performing the piercing with sterile equipment, the piercing trend has witnessed a disturbing rise in the incidence of attempted self-modifications, a problem that follows many body-piercing trends. Emergency rooms in major cities are being faced with the results of several botched at-home piercings a night, which can range from minor infection to major disfigurement and even death. “Well this, I, the bar is a thing… It wasn’t the right, o’break because, well there’s the working,” a surviving self-modifier sobbingly confessed after he accidentally punctured through the Wernicke area of his brain, an important region for language production, rather than his “cranial G-spot” as he should have.

In the wake of the exponential growth in the piercing’s popularity, medical professionals are expressing serious concern about the drastic nature of the body ornamentation. “Many body modifications entail a potentially dangerous procedure,” explained Dr. Kelvin Barrett, president of the American Medical Association. “It is extremely important to hire a trained medical person to conduct this piercing, which is essentially a surgical procedure. Jamming a rod through one’s own testicles is one thing, but piercing your own brain? That just isn’t safe.”