why does your body take so long to heal an ear piercing? But not that long to heal other types of small wounds

Question

Why does it take literally months?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Two reasons mainly.

Piercings that go through cartilage(the hard semi flexible stuff in your ears and nose) are much slower to heal up than soft tissue. Not all piercings go through cartilage as your ear lobes have none, but many piercings higher up do.

You aren’t meant to really have a hole through your ear or nose so your body tries to close it up entirely. But it finds a solid foreign object in the wound, which it doesn’t like, and sometimes causes inflammation and an immune response as the body is trying to get rid of your piercing so it can heal up. This especially happens with cartilage piercings and piercings that do end up getting infected.