My Nine-year-old's Ear Piercing Ripped, Not All the Way Through, but Close?

If the piercing hole has nearly reached the bottom of the earlobe, it would be best to repair it now as opposed to just removing the earrings and letting the piercings close. This elongation of the piercing will not get better on its own.

A split earlobe procedure is a very common and relatively simple procedure.

After it is done, you can wait around six weeks before having the earlobe repierced.  

 

I like to use a technique in which part of the skin lining the cleft of the torn earlobe (partial or complete) is used to create a new tract for the earring. This places the tract in the original position which was hopefully the correct position. Repairing the cleft and then re-piercing will often place the piercing in scar tissue which is not ideal. This technique works very well and is almost "instant gratification", since a sterile  earring is inserted at the time of the procedure.The procedure can be done easily under local anesthesia in the office.

A stretched hole from years of wearing heavy earrings or, as in this case, from an earring catching and pulling, is a fairly common problem. Many different surgical repair approaches have been described in the medical literature for dealing with these types problems, each having its proponents.

In the over thirty years I have been treating such problems, I have found one technique to be quick and easy to perform, relatively inexpensive, and one which yields gratifying results. The approach consists simply of first numbing the elongated hole or the torn area with a small amount of local anesthesia consisting of lidocaine with epinephrine. Following this, the inner sides of the walls of the tear are lightly cauterized, essentially creating a fresh wound.  Next, the wound is tightly taped together with steristrips. In a  few days the walls of the freshly-created wound heal together closing the defect permanently.

Once this occurs, I usually suggest that both earlobes be repierced through a new location, nearby to the previous site (but not through the healed area). The reason for this is that healed wounds tend not to be as strong as the original tissue and would be more likely to stretch once again. 

The whole procedure takes no more than five minutes to perform. Following repiercing, the new earrings usually mask any evidence of the retreatment.