APP 2025

We’re back from APP 2025! This past June 22 to 27, the 28th annual Association of Professional Piercers Conference and Exposition took place in Las Vegas. This is the thirtieth anniversary of the first APP event and, with two years off because of COVID, this is my twenty-seventh time attending. 

The APP Conference and Expo is the largest gathering around body piercing in the United States. For many years the APP was not only the largest annual gathering of piercers, but it was the only one. Now this is no longer the case. As different countries and regions organize their own trade organizations (such as the UK APP, APTPI, and Benelux in Europe, LBP and others in Central and South America, and the JPPA in Japan) many have started to organize their own conferences and classes.

Here at Infinite, we normally use this opportunity to take as many staff members as we can to the annual APP conference in Las Vegas, but this year was a little different. With many other events now happening worldwide, our piercers were given the opportunity to go to Las Vegas or instead attend the upcoming BMXnet conference taking place in Berlin next month. Not surprisingly, most of our piercers decided to sit out this year's APP conference, so we had a smaller gang.

Besides me we had an entire crew of non-piercers attending, from managers to those doing front-of-house sales and back-of-house office support. From our office crew, we had Maddie, Hal, and Steele, along with Infinite's Assistant Operations Manager, Laine, and Operations Manager, Jes. It made for a different experience as we navigated between education and other conference offerings. Classes at APP run the gamut from basic to advanced, from techniques for piercers to retail concerns for sales staff. From microbiology to human resources for body art studios. From body art legislation to social media marketing. There is, as they say, something for everyone.

The APP is not only an educational conference, but has a wholesale vendor exhibition with a selection of the piercing jewelry vendors from all over the US—and the world. In addition to classes, the annual APP event is an opportunity for vendors to introduce new products and new designs, and the year for many of us in this industry begins and ends around the APP Conference and Expo in Las Vegas every year.

We not only get to see new products (and bring lots home!), we get to interact with vendors who we only talk to over the phone for the rest of the year. We not only get to see new and amazing jewelry, we get to meet with some pretty amazing people as well.

At Conference is also the annual exhibit from the APP’s Body Piercing Archive. Since 2015, the Body Piercing Archive has been organizing exhibits showcasing piercing history, our history, and this year it celebrated 50 years of Gauntlet, the first piercing studio in the US.

The full history of Gauntlet is in Jim Ward’s excellent book, Running the Gauntlet. The abridged version is: started in 1975, Gauntlet was the business started by Jim Ward for making piercing jewelry. They opened their first (the first) piercing studio in Los Angeles in 1978. Gauntlet went on to open studios in San Francisco and New York, with a franchise in Paris, before unfortunately succumbing to bankruptcy in 1998—but its legacy lives on in every piercer and piercing studio, from the jewelry designs we use to the piercings we offer to the way we perform them. In addition to Jim Ward’s early life, the exhibit covered the years of Gauntlet’s existence, from its start in 1975 to its dissolution in the late ‘90s.

Now, we’re back home, catching up on sleep and going through our photos. We’re also diligently going through our jewelry purchases brought back from Las Vegas, photographing and building new products for sale online and in-store. It always takes us some time to catch up afterward, so keep checking our Instagram feed for announcements as we work to get our APP purchases out into stock.

Next month, BMX!

[Thanks to Jes, Laine, Maddie, Hal for photos. The 35mm film scans that follow are from Steele Knapstein.]