How to Wear a Septum Piercing: Ideas From Celebrities Who Did It

A septum ring is the only piece of jewelry I know that can be flipped up and hidden before a meeting with your bank manager. That small mechanical trick explains half of its celebrity career. Florence Pugh, Zoë Kravitz and Bella Thorne got the real thing; Rihanna, Gigi Hadid and, most likely, a teenage Zendaya wore clip-ons that look the same from the third row. Here is who did what, what the piercing actually involves, and how to wear one without looking like you lost a bet.

What a septum piercing is (and what it is not)

The septum is the wall between your nostrils. A good piercer does not go through the hard cartilage: the needle passes through the thin, soft strip of tissue just in front of it, which piercers call the “sweet spot”. That is why a slightly crooked septum usually does not rule you out, and why the piercing tends to hurt less than people expect. Healthline puts healing at several weeks and up to a few months; aftercare is sterile saline and keeping your hands, and your foundation, off it.

Septum jewelry is very old and belongs to many cultures, long before punk borrowed it in the seventies and fashion borrowed it from punk. Pop got there early too: Janet Jackson was photographed with a septum ring in 1997. My practical opinion: the piercing is cheap, the jewelry is not, so budget for the ring rather than the needle.

The real ones: Pugh, Kravitz, Thorne

The best receipt belongs to Florence Pugh. In December 2021, hours before the Don’t Look Up premiere, she posted the whole process on Instagram with a fair warning: “Warning- last slide will make your stomach scream.” Her caption was the most honest piercing review I have read: “When you wanna be a cool grown up and get a cool new piercing and you instantly fail, go green and then faint.” She has worn the ring on red carpets since, including a silver one at the 2024 BAFTA afterparty.

Zoë Kravitz is the opposite story: no announcement, no fainting, just a ring she had worn for years before the 2015 septum wave, which Bustle noted was “nothing faux”. Bella Thorne got hers at a Los Angeles shop on her 19th birthday and showed the result on Snapchat, which is the most Bella Thorne sentence I have ever typed.

The clip-ons, and why I like them

In July 2014 Rihanna stepped out in New York with a diamond septum ring and the internet assumed she had been pierced. The Fader set the record straight: it was a “pretend piece” from Meadowlark, the Small Thorn Septum Ring, faux on the nose but with real white diamonds. Gigi Hadid did the same at a 2023 awards show with a faux ring, and Bustle concluded that Zendaya’s 2014 ring was most likely a clip-on before she posted a gold one in a 2015 selfie.

Here is where I come down: a clip-on is the most sensible beauty purchase a curious person can make. Wear it for a weekend, look at the photos, then decide whether you want a needle. Celebrities test looks for a living; there is no reason you should commit faster than Rihanna did.

How to wear one in real life

Start with the jewelry, because it sets the mood more than the outfit does. A thin plain hoop or a small captive ring is the everyday option, the kind of “barely there” ring Jessica Biel favors with very polished clothes. The contrast is the point: a tiny ring next to a neat blazer looks deliberate.

For something louder, follow Lady Gaga and match the septum ring to your earrings, so it reads as a set rather than an accident. A clicker with a small charm or stones works for evening; keep the rest of your jewelry quiet, because a septum ring, statement earrings and a big necklace together start to look like a shop window.

If your style is grunge or punk, a plain steel ring needs no help from me; that is the look the piercing grew up in. And if you work somewhere conservative, buy a horseshoe ring: it flips up into the nostrils and disappears, which brings us back to the bank manager.

My take

The septum ring has outlived three trend cycles because it is reversible in two ways: you can flip it up, and you can buy it as a clip-on. Pugh’s fainting post is still the best advice on the subject: do it because you want it, sit down for it, and accept that you may go a little green.

Sources

• Florence Pugh, Instagram post about her septum piercing (December 2021)
• W Magazine: Florence Pugh Passed Out Getting Her Septum Pierced
• The Fader: Rihanna’s ouch-less septum piercing (Meadowlark)
• Bustle: celebrity septum piercings of 2015 (Kravitz, Zendaya, Biel)
• The Zoe Report: celebrity nose piercings (Gigi Hadid, Lady Gaga, Zendaya)
• Elite Daily: Bella Thorne’s 19th-birthday piercing
• Yahoo: Florence Pugh at the 2024 BAFTA afterparty
• Nylon: celebrities who have had a septum piercing (Janet Jackson, 1997)
• Healthline: how long a nose piercing takes to heal