Figure 1.

Human piercings affect skin microbiome diversities. Alpha diversity of the (a) piercing microbiome increased significantly by two weeks after piercing, but (b) unpierced controls did not. Large red dots indicate medians, box and whiskers show the minimum, maximum, median, and 25th and 75th percentiles, and violin plots represent probability densities. Pairwise Wilcoxon signed-rank test V statistics and p-values are shown above each plot. (c) PCoA of Bray–Curtis dissimilarities before piercing (teal) and two weeks after (rose) show a significant increase in dispersion over time (betadisper, ANOVA, F = 4.9053, p = 0.03101). (d) No significant changes were observed in the unpierced controls (betadisper, ANOVA, F = 0.0189, p = 0.8911; PERMANOVA, F = 1.0692, p = 0.321).