Sleeping With A New Piercing: A Lavari Exclusive (2024)

Don’t sleep on the care you need to give your piercing once you come home with your sweet new body jewelry in! That includes how you sleep when you have body jewelry in, especially when it comes to sleeping with a new piercing. If you’re about to get a new piercing, or you’ve just come home with a new piercing, we have all the tips you need to make sleep just as restful for your body jewelry as it is for you.

As you might already know, a new piercing can be a pretty delicate spot for a while after you get the piercing done. Sleeping with a new piercing is important because you spend so much time sleeping–if you sleep in a way that’s bad for your new piercing, that could have some rough implications! Give your body jewelry the care and support it needs so you can make your aftercare period as smooth as possible.

In this article, we’ll tell you all about the healing process for your new piercing, the best ways of sleeping with a new piercing, and the reason sleep support is one of the best things you can do for a piece of new body jewelry. Then you’ll be able to go out there and ensure that your body piercing has all the support it needs to heal the right way. Plus, you’ll know it for future reference so you can take on your next new piercing like a pro.

Read on for all the tips you need, and we know your new piercing is going to look and feel great! Plus, you can always leave us a little message in the comments if you have any other questions.

Should I sleep on my new piercing?

Sleeping with a new piercing is totally fine, since you’re not supposed to take your piercings out until they’ve been in for about six weeks (on average). As far as the exact length of time you should keep your particular new piercing in, you should ask your piercing specialist about the part of your body you got your piercing in, what gauge the piercing was, etc. If the piercing was more intense than others, it might have to heal for longer!

One thing you should keep in mind so that you can heal–and sleep!–comfortably is that the rest of your piercing aftercare is crucial. Before you get around to sleeping with a new piercing, you should make sure that you’ve properly cleaned your piercing first. You can check out our guide to cleaning your new piercing if you want some tips, or you’ll probably have been given some pointers by the person who did your piercing.

One thing to keep in mind is that you should avoid putting unnecessary pressure on your body jewelry depending on what part of your body it’s on. Sleeping with your new piercing can be an issue if you, for instance, sleep on your stomach when you just got a belly piercing. Or if you were to sleep stomach-down when you’d just gotten a nipple piercing, that could also be an issue. With some piercings, like earrings, you’re going to need to be sleeping on one piercing or the other, but when you can, that’s something to avoid.

There are however some tips you can use to keep even your earrings from making contact with your pillow. Sleeping with a new piercing has never been so easy as when you use some fun hacks to keep your body jewelry out of contact with your bed! Try an airplane pillow to elevate your head and keep it in place throughout the night. You can also try silicone plugs that can go over your new piercing since those can also shield your earrings while letting you sleep normally.

Should I sleep with my old piercings in?

Actually, it’s not great to sleep in old piercings. While you’re supposed to keep your new piercing in while you sleep to help it heal, you should take out your earrings, belly rings, etc. before you go to sleep. This is because when you sleep there’s a lot of moving around you could end up doing that makes it possible for your piercings to become injured. There’s not a lot that can be done about that when you’re sleeping with a new piercing, but once it’s healed it’s safe to take it out, and you should.

Another reason you shouldn’t sleep with your old piercings in is because the body jewelry itself might get damaged! The studs your piercer would put in for a new piercing are made to be durable and simple. That’s because your piercer knows that you’re going to need to heal this piercing before you put in any new body jewelry that’s a little crazier. A simple stud also makes sleeping with a new piercing much easier.

However, when you sleep with an old piercing in, that’s much different than sleeping with a new piercing. For instance, you might have much more elaborate jewelry in with your old piercing than your piercer might have given you for the healing process. Since you’re likely to be showing off your piercing now that it’s healed and you’ve had it for a while, that could mean you have body jewelry with dangly bits and other problematic features.

When there are dangly parts on your jewelry, particularly when it comes to earrings, that can be a recipe for disaster where sleeping is concerned. You wouldn’t want to roll around the wrong way in bed and wake up in the middle of the night with your earring ripped out! That’s a gory image, so don’t let it happen to you. Sleeping with a new piercing is okay, but be careful when you sleep with an old piercing in!

Listen to your piercer!

There’s a reason your piercer knows what’s what. We’ve written before about how piercers have to go to school for a long time before they’re qualified to give you sweet new body piercings. That’s why if you have any more questions on sleeping with a new piercing beyond what we have for you here, you can just ask the expert! Body jewelry is your piercer’s whole job, so you can count on them to know what’s best for you.

A piercer can also give you tons of advice based on exactly which body part your new piercing is on. While this article is here to give you general info, you can ask your piercer specifically about sleeping with a new piercing like your own, and they’ll be able to help you in more detailed ways. If they have a tip about belly rings in particular that they’ve learned through years of practice, you can benefit from that if you ask!

Plus, when it comes to sleeping with a new piercing, your piercer could have even better tips than the airplane pillow or the silicone plugs that we mentioned above. Since the pillow and plugs mostly work for earrings, you might find there are other possibilities for belly piercings or nipple piercings. Then sleeping with a new piercing will be a piece of cake for you, so you can heal up and flaunt your new body jewelry for all it’s worth.

Listen to your body!

If something’s wrong with your new piercing, you’re probably going to know. If something to do with sleeping with a new piercing doesn’t feel right to you, then that’s a good instinct to follow. This is one of the many reasons why it’s good to keep your piercer’s contact info–if you have a question that’s super specific to your own body, they’re the best person to talk to. If you don’t feel right about something happening with your new piercing, that means you should get it checked out.

We’ve written before about how to know if something is going wrong with the healing of your new piercing, so you can see our other tips on how to listen to your body. Sometimes instead of listening to your body, you can get stuck in your head, obsessing over what could happen. However, if you read this article and still have an issue, that’s the time to get out your piercer’s number and see what they have to say.

Another good tip when it comes to listening to your body is to take some time to sit with just your body–there’s nothing like meditation to reveal the truth! Whether you’re sleeping with a new piercing or just going about your day, you can find out tons about your body when you just sit there in stillness and listen to yourself without judgment. If there’s a random worry that’s only in your head, that’s the moment when you’ll see that your new piercing isn’t actually exhibiting that symptom–you’re just worried it might be!

So what have we learned? For one thing, we hope you’ve learned that sleeping with a new piercing is okay, as long as you’re safe about it! Plus, we hope you know to take out your old piercings before bed–when you’re not healing a new piercing, you just aren’t treating your body or your jewelry right by going to sleep with an old piercing in. And finally, you should listen to the guidance your piercer has for you, since they’re the experts!

We can also offer you some tips about how to make the most of your healing time. You can give your new body jewelry the best support you can, to make sleeping with a new piercing the easiest possible experience. While body piercings are pretty easy to get, it’s easy to forget that your body needs to heal after these experiences! While a body piercing is easy to heal from if you take the right steps, it’s also crucial to give your body what it needs.

It’s pretty easy to forget that sleeping is as important a time for healing as the time you’re awake, and it’s even easier to think there’s nothing you can do to make it easier for your body to heal during this crucial time for your new piercing. But if you take the time to make sleeping with a new piercing as healthy for your body as possible, you’ll find that the benefits are huge when you take measures to give your body jewelry the best possible start.

What kind of tricks do you use to make your body piercings as comfortable as possible while they heal? How does sleeping with a new piercing work for you? Do you have tips to share with the rest of the Lavari fam? Let us know in the comments–we’d love to hear from you! Just drop us a line and we’ll get in touch with you to connect over our mutual love of body jewelry!