“I’m pretty sure my greatest accomplishment in my life is my right ear. It represents everything I’ve ever achieved.” I say this kind of thing a lot – only half-joking – to my husband, close friends and anyone who makes an innocuous comment about one of my earrings and realises, too late, that this is the equivalent of casually asking Kourtney Kardashian about her wedding plans. It’s not my ear I’m proud of exactly, but the piercings that adorn it. A chaotic constellation of sparkles which never fails to make me smile.
There are 18 piercings in total, zigzagging across both ears and studding my nose, enough for me to easily be the poster girl for every “midlife piercing comeback” article you’ve ever read. Piercings are my hobby, obsession (or is it addiction?), and – as my husband might say – the habit I keep wasting my money on when I should be doing the responsible thing and sorting out my pension.
As someone “turning-40-this-summer”-years-old, it’s quite possible all these piercings are my equivalent of a midlife crisis, desperately trying to find parking in overcrowded cartilage and lobes… but I see my piercings as a glittering map, illustrating my life story so far. They’ll show you places I’ve lived, introduce you to people who matter, celebrate occasions I’ve wanted to mark. There are love stories with friends and family threaded through; there is deep, unshakeable grief. Self-doubt and acceptance. It’s all there, written on, and around, my face.
Other parts of my body tell a story, too – the cartilage of my upper right ear, my belly button, the right nipple that only ever managed to release my babies’ milk in unsatisfying dribbles. Ghostly scars of long abandoned piercings past, hardened over the course of two decades. These carry as much meaning as the holes still glittering with jewels.
Over the decades, I’ve swapped tattoo parlours and titanium ball studs for Maria Tash and rose gold spikes. The thrill of each new piercing is every bit as exciting as it ever was, a memory to cherish long after the initial sting has faded.
Of the many piercings I’ve acquired throughout the course of my life, the only ones I didn’t want were the first. My mother decided I should have my ears pierced when I was seven-years-old and took me to Ylang-Ylang, a jewellery boutique in my native New York. With eyes scrunched shut, my small hand squeezed around hers, I anticipated pain… and felt a rush of excitement instead. It never faded; after waiting the interminably long eight-to-10 weeks for those first holes to heal, I realised my ears could become the jewelled equivalent of pick-and-mix. I was no longer boring old me. My ears could spread a message of peace, love and yin and yang through the endless cheap studs, hoops and danglies, sold in colourful multipacks, that were now at my disposal.
The late ’90s, aka my teenage years, offered up a smorgasbord of delights for any nascent piercing fanatic. Piercings were brash and attention-seeking (see: Fairuza Balk’s giant nose ring in The Craft and Britney’s highly coveted jewelled navel bling), and I liked to imagine a version of myself with pierced everything, the bane of every metal detector. I was certain the click-click of these subversive-for-the-time piercings would be the soundtrack of my liberation. Surely they were all I needed to transform from shy, gawky and overly self-critical ballet dancing teen to the rock star goddess I was certain lived inside me somewhere?
There was one small barrier between me and all fantasies of metal barbells sticking out of my face: my mother, who couldn’t comprehend why a septum ring and Smurf-blue hair might appeal when I had Tiffany & Co. Elsa Peretti Open Heart studs at my disposal. I still remember the tears – hers, not mine, even though I was the one getting cartilage punctured by a piercing gun – when she finally relented and took me to Claire’s for a helix piercing. Sitting me down afterwards, she explained that piercings were fine as long as I made sure to “hide the crazy”. “Just make sure you look employable,” she added, a comment that still makes me smile considering I stopped working in an office in my mid-twenties and have worked from home ever since.
The “hide the crazy” piercing era ushered in a time of secrecy. I no longer needed my mum’s permission, so I started omitting certain details… like not mentioning the ill-fated belly button ring acquired in a tattoo parlour in Oxford on my first-ever trip to the UK, aged 16. I didn’t call my mum excitedly to tell her about the “what the hell was I thinking?” nipple ring, either. It was the least likely souvenir I could have come home with after a term studying abroad in St Petersburg (an achievement made possible thanks to the encouragement of friends and copious amounts of vodka).
These experiences felt freeing and spontaneous at the time, but it was all surface level. I did start to understand that true self-acceptance requires a tad more effort than forking over £30 for someone to make a hole in your body and shove a hypoallergenic hoop through it. Though the piercings didn’t last very long, I like that the battle wounds from them remain, little reminders of the person I once was, and wanted to be.
My mother was an expert when it came to “hiding the crazy”, always a picture of perfection, the put-together counterpoint to my unruly, sloppy, trying-to-be-punky chaos. Until, one day, she couldn’t do it anymore. When I was 23, she had a mental breakdown and I lost her to suicide. For once, the last thing I wanted to do was poke another hole in a body that seemed suddenly full of them. Holes that wouldn’t heal over as easily as those small, taut scars formed in the places my rejected piercings used to be.
I religiously started wearing the last pair of earrings I ever saw my mother in, chunky yellow gold Cartier hoops with peridot triangles. They were so heavy that after a few months of wearing them daily, they’d stretched my first holes perilously close to the bottom of my lobes, but I didn’t want to take them off. Wearing them helped me feel like we were still connected somehow. Other than my memories, her stuff – the clothes, the accessories, so many pairs of earrings – was all I had left of her.
By the time Maria Tash opened in Liberty in the mid-2010s, ushering in an era of “curated ears”, I was inescapably an adult, a Londoner and a 30-something with four kids. A motherless mother. I was grown up enough to recognise that my desire for piercings was never about inciting my mother’s ire: we were just different.
In the half-awake blur of early-years motherhood, a new piercing became a way to reclaim a sense of myself as a human who wasn’t attached to a child. In fact, getting a new piercing – or three – became almost a ritual for me, a celebration of my body becoming mine again, after I’d finished my latest marathon stretch of pregnancy and feeding a newborn. I didn’t want to hide myself anymore, and piercings felt like a way for me to display the most intimate, secret parts of my identity.
Piercings may have rehabilitated their reputation since the ’90s, going from “transgressive” to “fine jewellery”, from back rooms in out-of-the-way tattoo studios to luxury, spa-like destinations in the world’s top department stores, but I continued to feel the heat of my mother’s words of warning prickle my neck every time I thought about what 15-year-old me most wanted and never managed to get: a facial piercing.
There was an added complication now: the middle of my face was an angry conflagration, a combination of hormonal acne, inflamed patches and pustules (rosacea) and bloody scabs (the result of dermatillomania, a skin picking condition I’d developed after my mother’s death). A curtain of hair and shame hung in front of my face at all times, but one day – an unlikely midweek date night with my husband – I decided to stick a sparkly stud right in the middle of it all. A year later, I got my second nostril piercing and did something way more shameful than anxiety-related skin picking: I told anyone who would listen that I fancied myself as a sort-of “Lenny Kravitz of the school run”.
Piercings now commemorate the big moments in my life – in fact, they’re the only present I ever ask for. Tenth wedding anniversary? We’ll toast it with a Tash Rook piercing. A visit to London from my estranged father whom I only see once every handful of years, if that? Let’s book in three piercings for when he’s in town. His treat. A dear friend’s birthday? Lunch and some lobe bling sounds about perfect.
Last year, my eldest child asked to get her ears pierced at The Alkemistry for her 11th birthday present. A different city, country, even century from that first piercing trip I took all those years ago with my mom… but there were so many similarities, too. I watched my daughter’s emotional state transform from nervous to brave (“Oh, that was it? That wasn’t bad at all!”), and like my mum did with me so many times, I urged my daughter to get what I wanted for her (“Two piercings in one ear and a single in the other?”). She refused… and I’ve never been prouder. Piercings are so not about what our mothers want for us, no matter how much we love them.
My piercings feel like my very own Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. While I’m not sure exactly where the adventure will take me, I feel excited that 40 is another beginning. These days, I’m a main character who’s more sure of herself and happier than ever to take up space, to sparkle. Now, for the big question. What says “40” to you – a dermal, Medusa or tongue ring? Yeah, I thought so, too. All of the above.
