How many people have handled your jewellery before you? September 30, 2015 11:38

Here at Emba Mods we pride ourselves in offering only the safest and best quality body jewellery to our customers. We believe that it is important to look after your body and the jewellery you choose to wear should be safe for your body.

We are one of the first UK body jewellery retailers to medically sterilise our jewellery using an autoclave (material permitted) for our customers. You can find out more about autoclaving on our FAQS page here.

Every piece of body jewellery we handle, whether it be for heat sealing or autoclaving, we always wear gloves to reduce contaminants from ourselves and we ensure the surrounding environment is as clean and hygienic as possible.

So how does it work?

Below is an image of one of our bespoke plugs that has been heat sealed. As this particular item is not able to be exposed to a high pressure/high steam environment (an autoclave cycle) we have heat sealed the jewellery using food grade poly-tubing to ensure that the body jewellery reaches you in the best possible condition. We also provide alcohol swabs with every heat sealed item so that you can effectively clean the area before insertion. Should you decide too, you are then able to return it to us (still sealed of course) and the jewellery stays as safe as it was when it left us.

Sealed Plug

For items that are suitable for the autoclave we place them into an autoclave/sterilization pouch to then be put into the machine (below).


As you can see below all attachments are removed before putting into the pouch so that the steam can penetrate every part of the body jewellery and effectively destroy any possible bacteria or spores that could be present on the surface of the body jewellery.

Open Autoclave Pouch

Once the jewellery has been through a successful cycle it is then removed and quality checked. This involves checking the pouch to ensure the body jewellery has not punctured the pouch, checking that any jewels present still have the same shine and checking the indicator strips (which are part of the pouch) have changed colour. This indicates that the correct temperature has been held for the correct amount of time (Minimum of 15min at 121C or minimum of 8min at 132C) as the indicator only changes under these circumstances. Below you can see that the top pouch has not been used and is brand new. The bottom pouch has run through a successful steam cycle in an autoclave, as shown by the steam indicator changing colour.

Autoclave Pouches

Here is an example of what you can expect when your order has arrived. You will note that there is a date on the top of every autoclave pouch. This date is to ensure that the item of jewellery inside will remain sterile, if unopened, for up to 6 months.

Sealed Autoclave Pouch

Why choose to shop with Emba Mods?

The decision to sterilize and seal our jewellery was an an easy one for us. We felt that this extra, but very important, step to selling body jewellery is something that needs to happen. For us it means that our costs are higher and we have increased processing times, but our customers are looked after.

We work closely with local piercers who adhere to strict professional practices and guidelines in hygienic, clean and safe environments for piercing. The measures undertaken by these professionals can often be undone by retailers who provide jewellery that may not be clean or safe. It is usually then up to professional piercers to rectify issues/problems that you may face from wearing un-hygienic or unsafe jewellery. So once you've followed the relevant aftercare advice and your ready to change the sterile jewellery that your piercer has skilfully inserted into your piercing, you can now continue to keep your piercing safe and hygienic when buying our jewellery.

For us quality and hygiene are not an added luxury, but a necessity.