Falling in love with yourself: How the piercers of Live Wire ensure your health and safety

The power a simple change can hold is great. They can be scary, but they can also make you feel more confident. For many, this is the goal of body modifications like piercings and tattoos. The responsibility for this change falls directly on the artist. Many shops have begun taking strides to ensure this responsibility is upheld to secure the best possible outcome for their clientele. One of these establishments is Live Wire, which is the only shop in the New River Valley to have its piercers become members of the Association of Professional Piercers.

The APP is an international health and safety organization dedicated to the education of body piercings to not only piercers but also health care professionals, legislators, health inspectors and the general public. The organization provides online courses, annual conferences, manuals, brochures, a quarterly journal and lectures. They also maintain their website with the most up-to-date and comprehensive information. The APP encourages piercers to endure their rigorous membership process to prove they uphold the APP’s high health and safety standards. 

Live Wire piercers Megan Shell and Kelly Crisafulli were accepted as APP members on April 25, 2025. Thus, recognizing and officially elevating them and their shop to this recognized standard. 

“We're already operating at the standards,” Shell said. “We were just not members yet.” 

Shell and Crisafulli shared that the process took months of arduous work, much of it involving waiting for needed items to arrive and installing them. These included hands-free paper towel holders and trash cans, an additional sink exclusively for hand-washing, air purifiers, doors for the piercing rooms and nonporous jewelry display cases. Their autoclave, a steam sterilizer used to kill harmful bacteria, viruses, fungi and spores on their piercing tools, was tested to ensure there were no bacterial spores within it that could cause contamination. Finally, the duo answered 30 questions in an essay and took a video of the outside and inside of the shop, including inside every drawer of the piercing rooms. 

“It feels really awesome to be approved first time because it's from my understanding, extremely common that people get declined for just minimal stuff,” Shell said. 

This accomplishment provided a stamp of verification and placed Shell and Crisafulli on a locator map on the APP website. Now, anyone who searches the area will know that when they come to Live Wire, they will receive quality service and jewelry.

The jewelry used to pierce Live Wire clients is implant-grade titanium, niobium, or solid 14-karat or 18-karat gold. Crisafulli shared that the part that goes into the piercing channel will always be titanium or niobium at their shop. Currently, these materials are the most hypoallergenic and all-around safest metal available for piercing. They ensure each piece is the correct size for the placement to minimize snagging and irritation due to weight, and that everything is polished to a mirror finish, meaning there are no scratches to hold bacteria.

“We like to encourage people to wear quality jewelry because it just makes your body healthier,” Shell said. “Your body's not trying to fight to wear something, and a lot of people don't realize how much that can just minimize your immune system, because your body is just fighting one little fight. It's a little microscopic fight, but it is just constantly working at it because you're trying to choose to wear something that might just be a little irritating.”

Another benefit is the network that they are connected to by the APP. The annual conferences that many of them attend or conduct themselves offer piercers a chance to share techniques and experiences with like-minded individuals. There is no one way to do a piercing, so people in the industry do them in a myriad of ways, none inherently better or worse than another.

“Kelly and I do things differently, but I've switched some stuff up since she's been here on how I do it and like vice versa,” Shell said. “We all learn from each other, and that's what's so important.”

This desire to learn and improve in any way possible only propels the quality of work and diminishes the room for complications. Some obstacles that may arise from body piercings include infections at the pierced site, bloodstream infections, dental trauma, allergic reactions, keloid formation, tearing and other jewelry-related problems, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics parenting website, Healthy Children.

The enthusiasm Shell and Crisafulli share for their job, genuine care for their customers and ethical standpoints of providing the best service possible have been a long time in the making. 

From a young age, Shell knew she wanted to be a piercer. Once she was 18, she made it a habit to visit her favorite local shop and make it clear she was available and interested. After learning one of the piercers was not interested in piercing anymore, she jumped at the opportunity to try and get an apprenticeship. Despite never receiving a call back about an interview, her persistence proved fruitful. After continued visits and expression of interest, she got an interview, which yielded her apprenticeship. After six months of working the counter and determining if she fit the team’s dynamic, Shell started observing piercings and learning more about how the shop operates. This apprenticeship continued for two years, during which Shell attended her local community college for business management. 

“It was long days, but again, worth it 18 years later,” Shell said. “I’m still loving it even more than I did when I first started.”

Before Crisafulli entered the field, she went to college and worked as a social worker for six years. She then transitioned to cosmetic tattooing, which she did at a shop in Richmond. After a while of working there, they offered her a piercing apprenticeship to provide her with more business.

“I ended up just falling in love with it, and I was like, I don't wanna do anything else ever again,” Crisafulli said.

Crisafulli eventually concluded this establishment was not the best fit for her and moved to Asheville, N.C. However, she did not feel at home at this shop either, the ethics of her coworkers differing from her own. This is when she decided to make the move to Live Wire. One of her friends from the first shop she worked at, named Freeman, had already made the move there to be with one of his friends, Chris Keener, one of the owners and tattooers. Crisafulli shared that this environment, filled with her friends along with Shell’s integrity for piercings, left her with no doubt in her mind that she wanted to be a part of it.

Living in Tennessee at the time, one of Shell’s friends who had been in Blacksburg for a few months recommended that she check out the shops. After taking their advice, she found a group of friends that she ended up helping demo and build a shop, Live Wire. 

“You start with nothing and then you can make it into something way frickin awesome like this place, and you would never imagine that it could look cool like this when you start,” Shell said. 

The interior of Live Wire is filled with flash sheets from a plethora of artists, skateboard decks, “Alien” memorabilia, movie and band posters and other items in each tattoo station that bring in each artist's personality. Creativity and self-expression overflow from the shop, a fact that is apparent as soon as you walk in the door, and one you are reminded of each new time you enter and observe a new addition. 

Shell came to Blacksburg often after the shop opened during the first week of January 2023 to assist with piercings when asked and able. It was not until March of 2024 when Gillian Burt, the other owner and a tattooer, asked her to be their head piercer and piercing department manager that she officially joined the team.

Both piercers shared that they and the tattooers strive to ensure that the shop environment is comfortable and safe. They each shared stories from the previous places they worked or ones they had heard where the owners cared more about money than the client’s health and safety. Each heavily disagrees and aims to focus on quality jewelry, correct anatomy and taking their client through the piercing process step by step to ensure they are comfortable and know it is okay with them if they change their mind.

This mindset and drive have been accurately reflected in the clients they have received. One of these clients is Samantha McCall, a Virginia Tech student who received a conch piercing from Shell in 2023.

“I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all,” McCall said. “Megan asked multiple times if I was okay, if I needed to adjust myself, if I wanted the light turned off, just very accommodating and wanting to make me comfortable.”

Gracie Maslyn, a Virginia Tech graduate and future graduate student, shares a similar sentiment after trusting Live Wire with six tattoos and a helix piercing over the years. 

“They walk pretty much through like every step that they’re doing, like I’m cleaning this and I’m going to do it this way, so it’s not nerve-racking at all,” Maslyn said. “They’re not going to do something that wouldn’t look right on you.”

This is true of the piercers and tattooers, both getting along and close enough with each other to feel comfortable with walking up to one another's booths to ask about what they are working on and spend time outside of work. Shell and Crisafulli described the shop as a family – close-knit and fun to be a part of.

“I have the best damn job on the planet, like hands down, you will never tell me otherwise,” Shell said. “I feel like all of us here feel that way. There is no cooler job than to do what we do for people.”

Each care for the well-being of one another, and their clients even more so. Regardless of the membership, Shell and Crisafulli operate with kindness and care to bring people the results they want to see. 

“To be able to have someone fall in love with their body is a big goal for me,” Shell said. “I don't care how I achieve it, whether it's a nostril piercing or nipple piercings or an earlobe piercing, like if I can make you fall in love with your body, that's what I want to do. I want to make people happy, and that's how I do that.”