How Long Will It Take For Your Nose Piercing To Fully Recover?

The hard bit is over, and now you've gotten yourself a badass nose piercing. But like with any body jewelry, it's now time for your body to get used to the foreign object and begin the healing process. For the lucky few, piercings can take just a few months to heal — with the right aftercare, of course. For others, those months can quickly clock up to nearly a year.

And thanks to it being pierced through cartilage instead of just skin, nose piercings generally take a little longer to heal compared to your earlobes. That period to full recovery not only depends on what type of nose piercing you get, but it also relies on your aftercare routine, as well. Of course, you could end up being one of the unlucky few whose body decides it doesn't want the piercing after all and rejects it — but hopefully, that's not the case.

Here is the typical healing time for a nose piercing. 

In general, it usually takes around two to four months for a nose piercing to finish the healing process, according to WebMD. A septum piercing, on the other hand, can take a little longer, clocking in at three to four months.

From the moment that the jewelry enters your nostril, you're in charge of looking after it on its road to full recovery. As Authority Tattoo notes, this means cleaning your piercing on the regular, which usually involves hundreds of cotton swabs and a lot of saline solution. This takes care of the piercing by preventing bacteria from growing, as well as any  infection that could occur.

A strict cleaning routine also helps you in being on top of any redness or swelling that doesn't subside. This can be the precursor to an infection, which can be caused by either not sticking to a strict cleaning routine, playing with the jewelry during the healing process, or a lack of sterilization at the piercing parlor.

There's also a possibility that your body rejects the piercing, which is easy to tell, as the body quite literally attempts to push the piercing out. As Medical News Today notes, if you can see more of the jewelry and it's moving more freely than it should — and the piercing hole gets larger — this can be a sign that your immune system is treating the jewelry as something it doesn't want in your body. In that case, you should visit your piercer so they can see what's going on.