Hygienic conditions

Hygienic conditions in a piercing and tattoo salon should be on par with those in medical clinics (although Croatian hospitals might not be the best example for comparison). Due to the lack of legal regulations for the piercing profession, there are no prescribed conditions that a salon must meet. This leaves the end user in an awkward position because they must research what to pay attention to during piercing. Since 2020, in Croatia, mandatory hygienic training has been introduced for all employees of tattoo and piercing salons.

All equipment used during piercing must be single-use or sterilized. Non-single-use equipment must be cleaned after each use (manually and in an ultrasonic bath), disinfected, protected against corrosion (the same protective agents as for surgical equipment are used for piercing equipment), packed in sterilization pouches, and sterilized. After sterilization, packaged equipment is stored in a clean and dry environment without the possibility of contamination or package damage. It is opened immediately before use on a client.

Sterilization is carried out in an autoclave (steam sterilizer) at a pressure of 2 bar, at a temperature of 134°C, for a duration of 30 minutes. This type of sterilization is the only suitable one for use in hospitals, including tattoo and piercing salons.

At Octopus, we use an Italian-made autoclave from Newmed, the Kronos B23 model. Each sterilization is tested with indicators found on sterilization pouches. If sterilization is successful, the color of the indicator changes from pink to brown. During the sterilization cycle, this autoclave model prints a sterilization report. In addition, once a year, we test the autoclave’s functionality by sterilizing bacterial spores with the A. Štampar Institute of Public Health.

Used needles are disposed of in specialized containers for infectious waste, which are collected on a monthly basis by Remondis Medison, a company authorized for the disposal of infectious medical waste.

The initial piercing jewelry we use is made from:

• high-quality titanium of grade Ti6AL-4V ELI, ASTM F136
• implantation-grade stainless steel SS316L (standards ASTM F138, ISO 5832-1)
• biocompatible plastics (Bioplast ®)

You can read more about jewelry materials at the provided link.

The jewelry placed during the piercing is sterilized in the autoclave. For changing jewelry in healed piercings, the jewelry does not need to be sterile, but it must be disinfected.