Removing a belly ring is straightforward once you know what type of jewelry you have and which direction to twist. Most navel piercings use a curved barbell with a ball on each end that unscrews, and the whole process takes under a minute with clean, dry hands. Before you start, make sure your piercing is fully healed, which can take 6 to 12 months for navel piercings.
Make Sure Your Piercing Is Ready
Navel piercings heal much more slowly than ear piercings. While earlobes take 4 to 6 weeks, a belly button piercing can take up to a full year to fully mature. Removing or swapping jewelry before the piercing has healed can cause irritation, tearing, or introduce bacteria into the wound channel.
If your piercing is less than 6 months old, leave the jewelry alone. Between 6 and 12 months, it can be hard to tell whether healing is complete just by looking, so checking with your piercer before removing it for the first time is a good idea. Signs that a piercing is still healing include tenderness when you touch the area, any crustiness around the holes, or slight redness.
Identify Your Jewelry Type
The removal technique depends entirely on what kind of belly ring you’re wearing. Most navel jewelry falls into one of three categories.
- Curved barbell (most common): A slightly curved bar with a ball on the top and bottom. One or both balls unscrew. Externally threaded barbells have visible threads on the bar itself, and the ball has a hole it screws onto. Internally threaded barbells have a smooth bar with a hole at the end, and the ball has a small post that screws into it. Internally threaded jewelry is gentler on the skin during removal because no rough threads pass through the piercing channel.
- Captive bead ring: A circular ring with a single bead held in place by tension. There are no threads. The bead pops out when you apply outward pressure to the ring.
- Dangle or charm belly ring: Usually a curved barbell at its core, with a decorative charm hanging from the bottom ball. It unscrews the same way as a standard curved barbell.
Step-by-Step Removal for Threaded Barbells
Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water before touching the piercing. Dry them completely, because wet fingers slip on small jewelry.
Hold the bottom ball (the one inside or below your navel) steady with one hand. With your other hand, grip the top ball and turn it counterclockwise. The standard “lefty-loosey, righty-tighty” rule applies. You only need to unscrew one ball. Once it comes off, gently slide the curved bar down and out through the bottom of the piercing.
If you’re removing internally threaded jewelry, the ball pulls away cleanly because the smooth bar slides through without catching. Externally threaded jewelry has small ridges on the bar that can lightly scrape the inside of the piercing channel as it passes through. Go slowly and pull in a straight line to minimize irritation.
How to Remove a Captive Bead Ring
Captive bead rings don’t unscrew. The bead sits between two slightly open ends of the ring and is held in place purely by the ring’s tension. To remove it, grip the ring on either side of the bead with your fingertips and gently pull the two sides apart. The bead will pop free. Once the bead is out, rotate the ring until one end reaches the piercing hole, then slide it out.
For thicker gauge rings, this can be difficult with bare hands. Ring opening pliers (available from piercing supply shops) make the job much easier by spreading the ring evenly without warping it.
What to Do When the Ball Is Stuck
A ball that won’t budge is one of the most common frustrations with belly rings. Body jewelry is small and smooth, and your fingers can easily slip before generating enough force to break the thread loose. A few tricks help.
First, make sure both the jewelry and your hands are completely dry. Water and skin oils make everything slippery. Next, put on a pair of latex or rubber gloves. The texture of the rubber grips the tiny ball far better than bare skin and gives you enough traction to break the seal. Grip the bottom ball firmly with one gloved hand and twist the top ball counterclockwise with the other.
If gloves alone don’t work, try wrapping each ball with a small piece of rubber band or a strip cut from a rubber glove for extra grip. Avoid using pliers or tools directly on the jewelry unless they’re specifically designed for body jewelry, because regular pliers can scratch the metal, crack gem settings, or slip and pinch your skin.
When nothing works at home, a professional piercer can remove it in seconds. Most shops will do this for free or for a small fee, and they have the right tools on hand.
Signs You Should Not Remove It Yourself
If the skin around your piercing is red, swollen, hot to the touch, or leaking fluid that looks like pus, you may have an infection. Removing jewelry from an actively infected piercing can cause the surface holes to close and trap the infection inside the tissue, which makes things worse. Redness, pain, and swelling that last more than a few days after a piercing warrant a visit to a healthcare provider. Let them assess whether the jewelry should stay in to allow drainage or come out as part of treatment.
Also avoid removing the jewelry if the skin has started migrating over part of the bar or if the piercing looks like it’s rejecting (the bar becomes more visible through thinning skin). A piercer can evaluate whether removal is the right call and how to do it without tearing the skin.
Caring for the Hole After Removal
Once the jewelry is out, clean the area gently with saline solution or mild soap and water. Pat it dry with a clean paper towel. If you’ve had the piercing for a long time and the channel is well established, the entry and exit points will likely remain visible as small marks, but the internal channel will gradually close.
How fast the hole closes depends on how long you’ve had the piercing. A navel piercing typically takes 9 to 12 months to close fully, with another 6 to 12 months after that for the tissue to stabilize completely. After stabilization, you’ll still see the entry and exit points on the skin, but you won’t be able to pass a bar through. If you think you might want to wear a belly ring again in the future, reinserting jewelry periodically keeps the channel open.
For the first few days after removing long-worn jewelry, keep the area clean and avoid tight waistbands that press directly on the site. The skin may be slightly indented or pink where the jewelry sat, but this fades over time.