I've succumbed to a midlife piercing
According to the internet I must be having a crisis, but I've never felt less crisis-y in my life (plus ear cuffs for needle phobes!)
Clockwise from top left: Sienna Miller, model, 60something stylist Elizabeth Yoshida, my gorgeous friend, fashion stylist Shelly Vella
I’ve been itching for another piercing for some time now. In all honesty, I don’t know why I kept putting it off. True, I’m not a big fan of pain and my previous attempts to pierce my helix (the cartilagey bit on the outside of your upper ear) ended in, let’s just say, extreme discomfort. Although admittedly I didn’t make it easy for myself by a) having it done on more or less the same spot as an ill-advised kitchen piercing when I was a student and b) right before a long haul flight to Korea. Strangely, fourteen hours at 35,000 feet caused some swelling! Who knew?! Somewhere on the other side of the world I gave in and yanked it out.
I’ve already got five holes in my ears - not counting the closed up one. That’s not that many, just two in the left and three in the right, plus a belly button piercing that I had for about a decade and then sacrificed after a chiropractor I saw regularly for backache swore blind my piercing was messing with my chakras or some such rubbish. Like an idiot, I listened to him and took it out. My backache persisted (much more likely caused by the endless hours spent hunched over a laptop) and the piercing closed up. TBH I still regret paying him any attention.
It’s not so much the jewellery that I’m interested in (although I like a shopping opportunity as much as the next person) as the piercing itself. I’m much too lazy to wear earrings all the time, let alone change them with my outfit. Typically I leave a lone sleeper in the third hole on my right ear. I’m not sure how that started. It’s just a thing I adopted then forgot to take out. But I’ve always envied the multiply-pierced amongst my friends. One of my chicest friends, Shelly (above left), a fashion editor with tendencies towards the bohemian has a delicate nose piercing that she has always carried off with total nonchalance. (It currently features a tasteful lemon blossom stud by jeweller Alex Monroe.) When we worked together, back in the early noughties, I contemplated imitating her (in this as well as most things style-related) but had to admit I spend too much of the year with colds for it to be anything other than gross. Similarly, someone I worked with a few years ago came in one morning with multiple diamanté piercings she’d acquired the day before from hip (and prohibitively expensive) piercer Maria Tash at Liberty. I coveted them hard, but still I didn’t do it.
It’s much the same with tattoos. (I’m equal opportunities in my envy!) Whilst I’ve always envied those women whose skimpy summer tops reveal small but perfectly formed tattoos on their shoulders and ankles, I’m similarly green-eyed at the sight of American poet Maggie Smith (below) or essayist CJ Hauser’s multi-patterned arms.
Tattoos fascinate me in general. I’m interested in the way they’ve crossed over from something so frowned upon when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s (“you’ll be stuck with it forever”, “what will people think of you?”) to an integral part of adolescence. Where I couldn’t wait for my 15th birthday to be allowed my first pair of tiny gold studs, tattoos are now almost a rite of passage. Wandering the streets of Edinburgh as the festival kicks off, there’s scarcely a woman under thirty who doesn’t have at least one on display. So perhaps it’s not so much a midlife obsession as a 21st century one, just another way of expressing your identity that Gen Z is so much better at grasping than we ever were.