We get asked quite frequently to talk about labrets (lip piercings), methods for stretching and the dangers of tooth damage and gum erosion. Below you find a response to one of those emails which we think sums up our thoughts quite well on the subject.

I will speak simply of my personal experience with my own stretched labret, currently at about 21mm. Labrets and other oral work are really the only ‘common’ piercings that have the potential to result in permanent damage that is very expensive to repair, if not irreparable altogether, in comparison to other procedures and stretched piercings. There are some safeguards that can be taken to give you the best chance that damage will not occur, but the reality is that in many cases it will eventually happen over time and that is something that needs to be considered.

The first safeguard is finding an experienced artist that has done many procedures which have healed well with no issues. Many people overlook the fact that not everyone is anatomically suitable for having a large piece of jewelry floating between their lip and gums/teeth, and an experienced artist will in some cases be able to recognize instances where there will definitely be problems. Placement is also very important, and is of course one of the single largest variables that can effect the long term success or failure of the procedure.

The second safeguard is properly fitting jewelry of a correct dimension and material for the piercing. The shape of the piece at any given size can make the difference between gum damage or not. Concave backs tend to be more suitable as the size increases. Going from round pieces to ovals allows you to minimize the height of the piece as you stretch, but there is a point of diminishing returns where an extremely wide and very narrow piece can put extreme pressure on the soft tissue at the corners of the piercing and becomes very difficult to fit because the very wide back must wrap around the gumline evenly without causing pressure. Weight is something that can be problematic (weight can cause prolonged healing, or issues with painful pocketing in the lip) but can also be useful for pulling the back of the jewelry toward the lip and away from the gums. It is also possible for an experienced jeweler to create flared pieces that will sandwich your piercing between a flare toward the face of the jewelry and the back, also pulling the back away from the gumline.

The last safeguard is simply to pay attention to your body. Be conscious of the movements you make with your mouth, and take steps to minimize any actions which result in the jewelry being pushed or sucked against your gums. Consider switching materials when you are eating, being active or engaging in any activities where a softer material or modified shape might minimize or prevent potential pressure on the gums or chipped teeth. Sleeping with labret jewelry out at night is extremely good for the piercing and allows you to prevent unconscious actions that would put pressure on your gums or teeth. If you care more for your oral longevity than your piercing, my last piece of advice is this: if you see signs of damage that you are not okay with, make arrangements to consider changing your routines, the shape of your piece, or if all else fails, removal.

Having a large labret piercing long term is all about priorities – my personal choice is for my labret, and although I practice everything mentioned above, I do have some minimal gun erosion that I expected. I know that while I have not seen anything further in several years, I can foresee eventually needing to make a realistic choice between my bottom teeth and my labret. When the time comes, I will make it with confidence and pride knowing that it is the best decision for my lifestyle and world view, and I encourage you to be open with yourself in doing the same.

Jared Karnes
Owner/Jeweler
Onetribe LLC

The coupon code is: 20OFFDEC2011

This will get you 20% off your order of $25 or more.

We truly appreciate your business – without your support we would not be able to do research on ancient cultures and traditional materials, or innovate in our industry to bring you new materials and beautiful designs. Because we are a very small company, discounts really hit home – we are making each item you see in our store with our own hands, which takes an immense amount of time and energy, and reduced cost for those items directly effects our capacity to produce future items. We mention this because we want everyone to remember that a small business operates completely differently than a large chain business with much more profit margin and mass produced goods. Business can and should be a mutually respectful partnership between a business and a customer. Please always do as much shopping as you can at smaller independent, especially local businesses, and remember that there are real people with passion for what they do behind that counter or website.

Please use and share this coupon to bring new beauty to the lives of yourself and your friends. Know that we are thankful for your patronage, and thank you so much for another year where we were able to do what we love every day!

(Please note that some products do not qualify for discounts – the materials or time needed to complete the piece may prevent us from offering a discount. This coupon is non-retroactive and will not apply to any order prior to the publish date and time of this blog post, nor can it be applied retroactively if it was not utilized during checkout upon original order submission.)

Order totals $60+ after discounts: a sample vial of our Everyday oil blend, which you can read about here.

Order totals $100+ after discounts: a 1oz sample of our favorite yerba mate tea, found here.

Order totals $300+ after discounts: our Zeep! brand soap gift pack.

You will not see mention of these items in the cart – we will check every order’s final total between November 25th and January 8th and add the item to your order prior to shipment. You’ll see a mention of it in your shipment confirmation email.

One item per order based on the final order total. This offer is valid until January 8th or until we run out of each item. We reserve the right to make substitutions if we’re running low. If you have questions about these gifts, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Thanksgiving: Thursday November 24th through Sunday, November 27th. Return to business Monday, November 28th.

Christmas: 12pm December 22nd through Sunday, January 1st. Return to business Monday, January 2nd.

Please note that upon return, we will start carving and shipping the oldest orders first. It usually takes us about a week and a half to get caught up.

Shipping Information

Because of the extraordinary volume of mail during the Christmas season, from the end of November through Christmas and for a week or two afterward, the mail system experiences very high load and is prone to delays. If you require an order in time for Christmas, we strongly suggest selecting the fastest, most secure shipping method you can afford, and be mindful of products which have a production time. We will not rush orders through production and sacrifice quality – you are paying for the best that we can accomplish, not what we can do in a hurry. We cannot be responsible for delays in shipping resulting from slower or non-trackable methods.

Click here to view the United States Postal Service Holiday Shipping Deadlines

Click here to view the FedEx Holiday Shipping Deadlines

If you have questions about whether a parcel will arrive to your destination from our workshop (Richmond, Virginia 23224) by a certain date, please call the shipper. They will have the most up to date information about the status of their shipping network.

Custom Orders

Our custom order queue has been suspended until 2012 so that we can finish up what’s left in the current queue and make sure we have adequate time to produce all of our new made-to-order products through the end of 2011.

The swastika is one of the earliest human symbols, in use perhaps 10,000 years ago in the Indus River Valley, and with use across most of Asia and Southeast Asia as well as North and Central America since then. Countless individual cultures have scratched, drawn, painted, molded, tattooed and scarred their unique variations on the swastika into their art, architecture, religious rights and bodies for thousands of years.

While we do not in any way wish to underplay or devalue the Nazi re-appropriation of this symbol as a means for their own twisted reasons, we believe that this is a symbol which belongs to all of humanity, and that it should not fade into existence as a tainted version of its former beauty. This initiative is important to us and we feel that especially now, a universal symbol of peace and calm for humanity is something that is worth clinging to. What better symbol than that which we’ve used for perhaps ten thousand years?

In support of the fragmented worldwide mission to reclaim the swastika as a symbol of peace, we have collaborated with friend and brilliant artist and tattooer Marc of Little Swastika in Radolfzell, Germany to bring to fruition a small collection of swasti inspired plugs. The collection consists of some pieces that are more subtle, and some that are more easily discernible, but all designed and carved with nothing but respect and love for the history and the symbol: these are gentle swastikas.

Below is a photo of many of the original prototypes carved from drawings. Most of these will make it into production in various materials as we have the resources to make them.

We currently have small runs of several of these in a couple of materials and we will be releasing them on a schedule for the rest of the month of November. Below you will find the pieces and their release dates.

Friday, November 4th – Tiger Ebony Lotus Swasti & Ebony Square Swasti

Friday, November 11th – Bloodwood Lotus Swasti & Tiger Ebony Square Swasti

Friday, November 18th – Spiral Leaf Swasti & Butterfly Swasti

Friday, November 25th – Fishtika

We will continue to release the remaining styles as well as expanding the sizing and materials offerings later in the year and into next year. We welcome questions and comments on the history and use of the swastika itself, and we have plans for an article dedicated to this topic on our new website. In the mean time, we suggest checking out a few of these resources.

The Gentle Swastika: Reclaiming the Innocence – The best guide that we know of about the history behind the peaceful use of this symbol, including information by culture, region and timelines of use. Showcases a variety of historical records, artifacts and photographs of religious use of the gentle swastika, as well as use in architecture, clothing and pre-war commercial products, including Coca-Cola ads and sports team sweaters. Local customers are welcome to come in and read our copy.

Gentle Swastika Collective Directory – A collection of reader submitted and found photographs showing historical use of the swastika around the world in architectural use, jewelry, clothing, products, etc. Also, modern art works, tattoos, etc. showing modern peaceful use.

Little Swastika’s Overview – Marc (who illustrated the initial images for many of the plugs in this new collection) has a short informational page on his site that is a good read.

Reclaim the Swastika – A small site devoted to a concise overview of the history of peaceful use.

Swastika on Wikipedia – A suprisingly good overall history of worldwide use. Wikipedia obviously isn’t the end-all of factual resources, but this is quite a good overview.

We will be starting with a few of our normally stocked carved designs (aztec flowers, sugar skulls, koi) in wood and expanding from there into other carved motifs and materials. This will permit us to set these carved inlays into gold or silver and hardware attach them to any made-to-order plug style or material – woods, stones, etc. in any size, including obscure and in-between sizing, in any flare configuration (double flared, single, non, mayan, top-hat, etc). We know individuals have different tastes and these changes will help us more easily cater to these needs without keeping an astronomical amount of finished jewelry in fixed sizes on hand.

We’ve also created a considerable number of brand new products – both new designs as well as several new mixed-media inlay pieces. First, we’ll show the stocked products for which there are more than one set in each size. Click on the product to view that page for sizing and pricing.

Below we have shown the products that are limited stock or one of a kind. If these links dead-end, it means that product has been purchased. Click on the product to view that page for sizing and pricing.

For the full run-down on all of the latest products that we’ve added, visit the New Products section of our website. We are constantly adding new stock and one of a kind or short run items.

Lastly, we wanted to mention that we are starting to change up the way we do some of our carved items. We have started to carve our aztec flowers, koi, sugar skulls and other items as carved wood cabochons which we can set into silver or gold and inlay into anything (the same wood, other woods, stone, carved pieces, etc). This will give us much more modularity because some materials are not suitable for carving the designs into for solid plugs. It allows us to avoid stocking so much jewelry, and instead we can create exactly what you’d like in a specific size. Because all of the inlays will be hardware set without the use of glues or adhesives, your jewelry should last your lifetime, possibly longer with proper care.

Our new showroom/workshop address is as follows:

Please do note that our mailing address, for the sake of consistency and security, is still our Post Office box:

We will post photographs of our new workshop and showroom areas as we finish setting everything up. Here’s the space as it sat before we started moving.

Good things are coming!

We are asking our customers to consider visiting their local museums and documenting the collections on a short two page form to be submitted to us for inclusion in the database. We will accept submissions for establishments worldwide, as long as the submission is either provided in English or provided in your native language with English translation.

We’d be delighted to see some very thorough submissions with photographs and detailed descriptions of the collection. In exchange for your effort we are prepared to offer up to $10USD in store credit per museum submission to help with your admission cost. You get to see some amazing things and learn, you help us out by growing our database with museums we may not be physically able to visit, but most importantly you will help everyone interested in body modification gain greater access to educational information that might otherwise be difficult to find. We are hoping that with our combined communal efforts we will be able to establish a considerable list of collections for people to visit as they travel.

You can download the form, available in PDF format by clicking on this link. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Beautiful gemmy Virginia amazonite pyramid faced plugs in 00g/9.2mm with 3/4″ / 19mm faces. This is a very fragile material and these were very tricky to make but turned out wonderful.

Here is our signature pinwheel flower design carved in black jadeite and inlaid with 6mm gem quality Idaho opals. The inlays are wrapped in silver bezels and the stones are riveted together with hardware – we do not use glue in our fine stone inlay projects.

This was a very intensive project involving several artists from our team. Custom drawings, which the customer approved, followed by wood carving, stone carving and then metal work. The sugar skull plugs carved in ebony and have both oval faces and an oval wearing surface in 32mm. The eyes are gem grade amethyst meticulously hand carved as 8mm wide flowers, each with a hidden metal setting and rivet securing the stones to the wood. As with all of our high end mixed-media projects, these pieces involve only the finest materials and traditional jewelry settings, with no glues used.

These very special pieces were a pleasure to work on. These are 3″ Narra plugs with traditional African clay lip plates carved down to serve as unique inlays. The Narra plugs were carved with a specific bowl angle to the faces which allowed us to, with a very large hidden silver setting, bezel set these pieces floating over the edge of the wood so that the very fragile clay edge makes no contact with the plug, and in fact hovers over the surface of the wood, casting a shadow that showcases the lip plates as if they were hanging in a display.

We have been the first company to bring several materials to the world of body jewelry, including this very rare ammolite material. Ammolite is the fossilized iridescent material from ancient ammonite shells. It is one of the rarest gemstones on earth, occurring in gem quality in one or two places worldwide. The material is extremely fragile and very thin – fractions of a millimeter – which requires very careful excavation and handling. As such, we set these pieces as triplets, which are composed of a layer of ammolite material backed with a slate base and protected by an optical quartz cap. These beautiful cabochons are set into 5/8″ ebony plugs with a silver hardware setting.

Speaking of unique materials, you won’t see this anywhere else. These are 35 million year old botanical fossils (a fern variety) set with a hidden silver setting and rivet into Narra wood.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the eyecandy!