March 29, 2011 - 8:10pm
Pangea Piercing re-opens in new location
BY LAUREN SLUTSKY
Students looking to get a tongue or belly button piercing can now look no further than East Liberty Street.
Pangea Piercing reopened for business on Jan. 31 at its new location at 211 East Liberty St.
According to j.c.potts, who manages Pangea and calls himself the “captain,” there were many factors that contributed to the move.
He cited the CVS/pharmacy that is scheduled to open next to Pangea’s previous location on State Street and said the construction would have negatively affected business.
There has also been a push for smaller, private boutiques and stores to move toward Main Street, potts said.
“The powers around here want State Street to become all large corporate restaurants and stores,” potts said.
The artists who work at Pangea — which opened in 1999 — also wanted more space and a building that reflected the type of work they do. Together, they came up with a new design in collaboration with Ann Arbor-based company PLY Architecture & Design.
Pangea offers almost any type of piercing a customer could imagine. While the most common piercing requests are for earlobes and nostrils — which cost $20 and $35 respectively — there are 43 standard procedures to choose from including tongues, eyebrows, nipples and navels. Potts said customers can be in and out within 15 minutes if they know exactly what they want.
Unlike some other piercing businesses, Pangea takes precautions when it comes to piercing sanitation. Pangea is the only piercing salon in Washtenaw County that uses sterile surgeon gloves —“the same kind used for open heart surgery,” potts said.
Most of Pangea’s clients are 18 to 30-year-old females, most likely because “guys are just not as sparkly as girls,” potts said. He added that Pangea has a “fashionable and health-conscience clientele” who buy the business’s higher-end jewelry and are interested in the health measures taken.
In order to work at Pangea, employees must have a minimum of five years of previous professional experience as a piercer or survive a two-year apprenticeship under one of Pangea’s senior piercers. Each of the five artists that work there has his or her own specialty, ranging from complicated multi-ear piercings to nasal septum piercings and wide-hole stretching.
“If Pangea was a ship, I would be the captain,” potts said. “We don’t like using terms like boss, employee or owner — we have hands, mates, souls and a captain. It is very much like the structure of a ship. We are a bit like family, and a bit like a naval vessel. We have a ship’s charter, docked at 211 East Liberty.”
Potts, who has 14 piercings of his own, said body piercings are important in his life because they helped him break out of his shy shell when he was younger.
“I am all for people changing their visual representation of themselves if it will improve their self-esteem,” he said. “If I can help people, just by making them sparklier, well, that’s what it’s all about in the end.”
While some students may get piercings to boost their confidence levels, LSA sophomores Dana Schostak and Dani Bukiet went to Pangea to raise their moral.
The two decided to get piercings after watching Michigan’s football team lose to Michigan State this year.
"We figured — why not do something fun after such an upsetting loss, so I decided to get a third hole," Schostak said.
Bukiet shared the same opinion.
"Although it was a spur-of the moment kind of thing, I have always wanted a cartilage piercing, and we were told Pangea was the best place to go on campus," Bukiet said.
Potts said he has a vision larger than just body piercing that he wants to spread with the help of his business.
“I want to have a place where people can come to share ideas and talk. It’s not just about getting sparkly,” he said. “We can come to common conclusions about human beings here. We focus so much on our differences that it leads to divisions. People are so worried about things like race, gender and sexuality that they overlook the commonalities between us. If we focus more on the commonalities, and less on the divisions, we can move forward as a species, rather than exploiting one another.”
