Gauges, millimeters, inches and piercings... When you start looking for piercing jewelry, you will undoubtedly come across one of these units. Finally, you have found the ideal jewelry for your piercing, hurray! What gauge should it be? How many inches does that correspond to? And how on earth do you find out how many millimeters that is again? The confusion can be great, but we are happy to explain to you exactly how it all works.
Vive la Revolution! A bit of history
That using different units of measurement can be confusing, they already knew a few hundred years ago. That is why it was decided at the time of the French Revolution that a universal system would be much easier. And so the millimeters were born (along with a lot of other units, but let's leave it at that for now). To this day, the metric system is used in almost all of Europe, which is why you will see millimeters as the size indication of your piercing jewelry in most places.
In the United States, however, it is much more common to work with the American Wire Gauge system. The AWG system does not measure in millimeters but in gauges. This means that standard sizes have been adopted to indicate a certain wire thickness. Initially, this was very useful for determining the wire thickness of, for example, electrical wire, but because a barbell or ball closure ring is in principle also just a piece of 'wire', the AWG is also used to indicate the sizes of piercing jewelry.
And then there are of course the inches. It is suspected that the inch has its origins in the width of a thumb, but measuring with your thumb is of course not particularly useful. Certainly not when it comes to piercing jewelry (talking about thumbing). Because not everyone has the same thumb, the values for the inches have ultimately also been neatly recorded and the inch as a unit of measurement is somewhat comparable to the centimeters.
We love a large assortment of piercing jewelry. That is why we also have various suppliers for our cool piercings, from different parts of the world. One manufacturer uses the AWG for their jewelry, the other manufacturer prefers the millimeters. Fortunately, we have become quite adept at converting all these different sizes back to millimeters, so that our site remains nice and clear and your favorite jewelry simply shows the size in millimeters.
Help, my size is not listed!
You may have noticed that certain plugs and tunnels are available in one version in a certain size, while another version suddenly makes a jump of a few millimeters. Those cool steel tunnels can simply be ordered in 12 mm, while those colorful eyelets suddenly make a jump from 11 mm to 13 mm. Super difficult of course, but this has everything to do with the production process of the manufacturers. One manufacturer makes its jewelry according to our European metric system, while the other manufacturer works from the U.S.A. and uses the American Wire Gauge system or the inches. Some sizes do not 'exist' in these systems, while for us they are actually quite normal sizes. Difficult! In such a case, you could decide to switch between two sizes by, for example, switching between 12 mm and 13 mm. Especially if you have been wearing a certain size for a while, this will hardly cause any problems.
Sometimes it also happens that a size is stated in millimeters on our site, but that the jewelry still has a size deviation due to the manufacturer's sizing. An example of this are the silicone eyelets from Kaos Softwear. You will see them listed on our site as 10 mm, while the eyelets are actually a fraction smaller, namely 9.2 mm. In any case, we always make sure that the product description clearly states what the actual size is, if the difference is too big. This way you can choose the most suitable size for your piercings and you prevent yourself from unintentionally ending up with a piercing jewelry that is too big or too small.
Finally, below you will find an overview of both the gauges, inches and millimeters. Hopefully this will make your search for the right piercing jewelry for your piercings a lot easier, so that you can ultimately enjoy your new purchases. And if you still have doubts about something, you can always reach us via info@alloverpiercings.nl or via telephone number 072-7370119. In any case, we wish you a lot of shopping fun at alloverpiercings.nl!
A table with an overview of the distribution of millimeters, inches and gauges
Piecing gauges and millimeters - size chart overview
