Pain, Price & Reason

"When it comes to your own body, How could you consider anything other than the premium option?" *quote- Jol Agni, Hand-Poke Tattoo Artist & Head Body Piercer at Trademark Ink, Cairns, Australia*

When an uninformed/unmodified person meets someone with extreme body modifications, Three questions surface frequently.
1- Was the modification procedure painful?
2- Is the modification procedure expensive?
3- Why did you decide to get the modification?
This is can be narrowed down to Pain, Price & Reason. For the most part, when an uninformed person asks these questions, it shows they have a genuine interest and willingness to understand body modifications and the people that have them.

Pain is variable depending on the modification procedure being performed but it is fair to say that at the extreme end of modification, there is always some level of pain involved. Furthermore; person to person, individual tolerances to pain vary greatly. There is also the healing period of said modification which can have its own separate levels of pain involved. Pain can be considered part of the Price but also can be synonymous with the Reason for some. For others it is fair to say that the pain doesn't really matter, it's just something that has to be endured to achieve the end result. Ultimately, most good things in life aren't acquired without some level of discomfort.

Price is something that can vary greatly for many reasons like any commodity. The most important aspects to consider are the quality/demand of the work performed and the experience/skill of the artist performing it. With that in mind, the majority of diligent body modification customers aren't looking for a "cheap price" as it will usually correlate with "cheap work". "When it comes to your own body, How could you consider anything other than the premium option?" *quote- Jol Agni, Hand-Poke Tattoo Artist & Head Body Piercer at Trademark Ink, Cairns, Australia*. Jol makes a spearhead point regarding price, this isn't a car or a motorcycle you are about to modify, it's your body which cannot be replaced. Bad/unwanted work can usually be fixed/undone but this is a road no-one wants to go down. After finding an artist you are happy with, being a loyal customer and developing a rapport is the best way for you to get better prices in the future. Meeting an artist for the first time and haggling with their price can be considered insulting. This is the wrong foot to get off on with an artist whose services you require. After all, you want your artist motivated don't you?

There are many reasons an individual will decide to get modified. Image is the most obvious, but their are plenty of other reasons too. Sexual enhancement is a common motivation for body modification and usually involves but is not limited to the genitals. Piercings, implants and incisions are common forms of modification for sexual enhancement. Spirituality & Religion is another common reason for body modification. An example of this is the Jewish Bris ceremony (foreskin removal), Remembrance is a popular motivator, people often get tattoos of loved ones in pictures or script. Old Sailors had a tradition of piercing their nipple and adding links each time they crossed the equator. Medical Reasons can arise too, A cochlear implant is an electronic device that replaces the function of the damaged inner ear. An arising trend is trans-humanism or human ascension which is basically defined as acquiring body functions that aren't the nature of a human being thus ascending/transcending what it is to be human. Some good examples of this are the magnetic implant and the RFID (remote frequency identification) chip implant which both serve to give functions a normal human being does not have. Admittedly these are minor functions but there are more extreme cases of this happening everyday. Who knows what the future holds...