Laws About Tattoos and Piercings
...um age for piercings. Tattoo and piercing laws vary from state to state, in Illinois for example, eighteen is the minimum age for any piercing without parental consent and twenty-one is the minimum age for a tattoo without parental consent. However many teenagers under age want to get piercings and tattoos. Many law makers say that is just too bad and the laws must stay in place. What they do not realize is that their laws simply do not work. There is no way to force the parlors not to pierce underage. Although many parlors do uphold these laws, there are an equal number that do not. Generally, the parlors that service underage clients are also the parlors that ignore other laws such as sanitizing needles and providing aftercare instructions. Law makers do not want to see that their laws do not work; they would rather leave them in place in order to say that they do exist. The people that object to the current laws believe that the minimum age for piercings and tattoos should be lowered to sixteen. They believe that by lowering the age limits, kids would not go to the less reputable parlors in order to get pierced or tattooed. This would mean kids would be pierced in safer locations than they are now. They think that living with the tattoo or piercing is better than living with HIV or Hepatitis. They also believe that there should be much tougher laws for the parlors. Including monthly inspections and turning over their records of piercings along with surveillance videos. This way, inspectors can check the books along with the tapes and make sure there is nobody being pierced under age. Although this would not eliminate kids using fake IDs, it would at least make sure that every client is listed with a copy of their state ID or driver’s license. There are countless reasons why this would not happen. For starters, there is no room in the budget to pay for these inspectors to go through all these tapes. Additionally, it would be nearly impossible to get a law lowering the age limits passed due to objection by parents. I was sixteen when I got my first piercing besides my earlobes. My parents did not sign for it, but luckily I had a friend who owned a piercing parlor so I did not go to a dirty parlor. At sixteen, I was not aware of any of the signs to look for when getting pierced. Once again I was lucky that my friend was clean and used a clean needle. I believe that the age should be lowered for piercings, but not tattoos. Although piercings and tattoos are very different things, they are always grouped together. Piercings are not permanent, if done safely and taken care of, they can be removed with little to no scarring. Tattoos on the other hand are permanent; unless you want to pay thousands of dollars for laser removal which I have heard hurts more than getting the tattoo in the first place. There is almost no way to monitor whether tattoo and piercing parlors service underage clients, but I think there should be more done to try. For example, police send underage kids into stores to attempt to buy alcohol in order to catch them all the time. This is never done with parlors. If this was done, along with $500 fines like the ones given to stores selling alcohol to underage kids, I feel that it would decrease the amount of underage piercings. This fine should also be given if there are any sanitation rules broken. Some states have phones numbers that have to be printed on the sanitation certification and the after care instructions that customers can call to report unsafe piercing and tattoo practices. From what I have heard, these states are very good at following up with these complaints. If there are a certain number of fines given, the parlor is shut down. This threat has worked to decrease infractions of the rules in other states, so I assume that it would also work in Illinois. I think that if the piercing age was lowered to sixteen at least some of t...