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You’ve been waiting patiently for months for your piercing to heal. Now, it’s finally time to start shopping for new jewelry. As you browse around, you see the word gauge everywhere. What does it mean? Body jewelry comes in different sizes and if you’re new to body jewelry, the gauge size can be a little confusing. Don’t worry, we’ll go over some gauge basics, so you can find the right jewelry for your piercing.
First off, what exactly is this system? Contrary to what you might think, the gauge system in body jewelry isn't about pressure or water levels; it's a method for measuring the diameter, or thickness, of wires. However, it's easy to confuse it with terms related to stretched lobes or stretching jewelry.
The origins of this system trace back to the industrial revolution when wire production involved drawing metal through progressively smaller holes, reducing its diameter with each pass. Manufacturers counted the number of draws as their unit of measurement—meaning a 6g wire underwent six draws. This explains why higher gauge numbers correspond to smaller wire sizes.
The gauge refers to the thickness of the body jewelry piece. When you see the size, it will have the number followed by the word gauge or its abbreviation “g”. The higher the gauge number, the thinner the jewelry will be. We know it’s confusing and counterintuitive, so check out the image below to get a better idea of what that looks like. You can see that 0g is much thicker than an 8g.
While we use the gauge system to measure body jewelry, there is no universal standard size measuring system for jewelry. In the US, we measure in inches, but international countries will measure in millimeters. Jewelry size for gauge ranges from 22g-00g. After 00g, jewelry will be measured in inches in the US and in millimeters internationally. To make it easier to compare between gauge, inches and millimeters, check out our handy conversion chart below. To see larger sizes on the chart, click here.
We often get asked, “Why don't large gauge rings come in small diameters?” Well, there are two main reasons for this:
During the maufacturing process, most body jewelry metals are worked while they are cold, not under heat. When you bend a thicker piece of metal into a circle while it’s cold, there are limitations on how tight the angle of that bend can be before it starts to undergo damage. If the metal is bent too much it can become stressed and will start to fracture, ruining both the sturdiness of the finished piece as well as the smoothness of the surface finish. Different metals have different stress points, that’s why you might find a 10 gauge 5/16" ring in steel but not in titanium. Titanium tends to be more brittle than steel, and steel can tolerate the stress of a more acute bend than titanium. However, even steel has limits as the gauge grows and the diameter of the bend shrinks.
Even when a large gauge ring can be made with a smaller diameter without damaging its structure, the piece is very difficult to work with. The larger the gauge, the more pressure and force is needed to bend it. A captive bead ring, for example, holds the bead in place with tension, and to remove the bead you have to widen the ring slightly to release that pressure. This can be easy to do with CBRs in small sizes, but it becomes harder to do as a ring's gauge gets larger. If the diameter of a large gauge captive ring is smaller, removing the bead becomes increasingly difficult, even with jewelry tools.
The good news is that companies are starting to incorporate heat into their manufacturing process, and they are able to create more large gauge rings with smaller diameters. They are also approaching problems with large gauge rings at the design level. For instance, a 6 gauge 5/16" ring can be made as a hinged segment ring, or clicker. Unlike captives or circular barbells that have beads and balls that need to be removed to be put on, clickers are made with a hinged closure mechanism as part of the ring. A clicker isn't held closed by simple tension in the ring, so it takes considerably less strength to open than a thick captive bead ring. As an added bonus, they also don't have separate parts that are easy to lose.
