by Brandi Fleeks

Created on: July 31, 2009

Since the early 1990s, piercings have grown in popularity in the United States, especially facial piercings. It was not uncommon to find the occasional pierced nostril before the trend began but now needles are being stuck into any place where there is enough skin to hold jewelry.

Though facial piercings are fun and are a chance to show how trendy or edgy a person is, they are not without drawbacks.

Your face is the usually the first thing people see when meeting you and it has been said, you can't judge a book by its cover. Unfortunately, there are those who will form an opinion about a person before they get to know him/her and facial piercings have a lot to do with forming the wrong opinions.

Job seekers are advised to remove any superfluous or "aggressive" looking piercings before handing in applications or arriving to interviews, and for a very good reason. Some piercings can be off-putting and cause an interviewer to be apprehensive about hiring a person with a facial piercing to represent their company.

Regardless of how qualified a person is for the position or how well said person did in his interview, a distracting piercing or piercings might be all the interviewer will remember causing the interviewer to give the position to an un-pierced person with the same qualifications, but maybe a little less flair.

A person might have an MBA from Harvard but that labret piercing he still wears will put him at a disadvantage with the firm he's been dying to work for since graduation.

Most mainstream employers consider any over expression of individuality unprofessional. Visible piercings and tattoos are prohibited and subject the wearer to disciplinary action. It may be fine for some alternative companies such as Hot Topic, a retail store known for employing seemingly rebellious persons and other organizations like it, to allow its employees to display their body art, but in corporate America this is unlikely.

Even fine dining establishments set high expectations for their employees and facial piercings are required to be removed before showing up to work.

Another disadvantage of having facial piercings is the stigma attached to those having undergone the procedure of having a needle stuck in his/her face for the sake of expression.

The conservative, older, generation does still influence societal views of people who stray outside of the box.

In extreme cases, the opinion that anyone who would do something as extreme has wearing a metal ring or bar in his face, is that he is of low caliber or is a "thug", "hoodlum" or miscreant. This unfortunate classification might cause those who wear or have worn facial piercings to be ostracized by those around them.

The scar from a facial piercing is also a drawback. Even if a person has outgrown her piercing phase, or is just tired of wearing the jewelry, there will be that everlasting reminder that she made the decision to have a needle inserted into the fleshy part of her face.

Those lucky enough to have skin that does not keloid may not have such a large reminder but there is the possibility that the hole never closes completely.

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