World's most pierced woman
In 2000, Elaine Davidson received a Guinness World Record for having 462 body piercings with almost half in her face. Now, she has more than 6,000 body piercings. From The Telegraph:
She said: "I don't enjoy getting pierced, but to break the record you have to get to a high level..."World's most pierced woman adds to her collection" (The Telegraph, via Fortean Times), More photos of Davidson at BMEzine
"My family don't even like tattoos or piercings.
"But I am happy. I decided to change myself and be me."
the latest
latest episodes
Lance: Hey, whattya think about Trudi? She ain't got a boyfriend. You wanna hang out, get high?
Vincent: Which one's Trudi? The one with all the shit in her face?
Lance: No, that's Jody. That's my wife.
The cruel thing was she had to board an airplane to claim her award, and it took 3 years to get through security. ;D
heh!
If we have laws that punish bar staff for continuing to serve someone who is obviously drunk, should we not also have laws that punish piercing staff for continuing to pierce someone who is obviously fucked up?
Jake, drunks kill people, pierced women do not. It's not your job to make sure she's doing what you want her to.
Her words explain it all.
@4 Jake
Define "obviously".
At least the bartending guideline makes sense because of the causal relationship between consuming alcohol and impairment of judgement.
To quote Chuck Klosterman:
I'm all for people doing whatever makes them happy (so long as it doesn't harm anybody else), but doing something you don't enjoy just to break a record? That seems a bit crazy.
No one in my family had any tatoos, not even Dad, who did 20 years in the Navy. So imagine my surprise when my sister (the WHITE sheep of the family) said she got four!
She had eyeliner tatooed on, because as Mom's dimentia got worse, the make-up got sloppy, and I guess that frightened Tracy.
I find that crap gross and disgusting, but "I will defend to the death her right to be gross and disgusting".
I think she doesn't like the act of getting pierced, but she seems to enjoy the piercings themselves, although one quote from her Wikipedia page says she "love[s] pain."
Also, um...she has most of her piercings in her...um...ooh hoo...500 according to Wikipedia.
should crazy be illegal?
I made out with her once.
Once.
I just wonder how you keep all of those piercings clean and uninfected. *shudder*
Owwwwwww!!! Eeeeeeew!!!!!!
Jeffrey Goines: You know what crazy is? Crazy is majority rules. Take germs, for example.
James Cole: Germs?
Jeffrey Goines: Uh-huh. In the eighteenth century, no such thing, nada, nothing. No one ever imagined such a thing. No sane person, anyway. Ah! Ah! Along comes this doctor, uh, uh, uh, Semmelweis, Semmelweis. Semmelweis comes along. He's trying to convince people, well, other doctors mainly, that's there's these teeny tiny invisible bad things called germs that get into your body and make you sick. Ah? He's trying to get doctors to wash their hands. What is this guy? Crazy? Teeny, tiny, invisible? What do you call it? Uh-uh, germs? Huh? What? Now, cut to the 20th century. Last week, as a matter of fact, before I got dragged into this hellhole. I go in to order a burger in this fast food joint, and the guy drops it on the floor. Jim, he picks it up, he wipes it off, he hands it to me like it's all OK. "What about the germs?" I say. He says, "I don't believe in germs. Germs is just a plot they made up so they can sell you disinfectants and soaps." Now he's crazy, right? See? There's no right, there's no wrong, there's only popular opinion.
MyPalMike
Johnny Dangerously?
#13 - I don't think that she keeps them too clean. Check the ones on the stomach in this pics: http://news.bmezine.com/2008/03/20/elaine-davidson-update/
I used to see her round Edinburgh (Scotland) all the time. During the Edinburgh Fringe Festival every year she would be out on the streets getting photos with tourists and so on.
The weirder thing was seeing her on the bus on the way home from work, or going to do the shopping, or something.
After seeing her regularly enough, I stopped paying much attention. Funny how pretty much anything can become routine.
Oh, and all those criticising - get over it.
At least she's less vulnerable to tragedy than another Guiness Book winner I could name:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7889890.stm
I always thought it would be cool if she hooked up with The Leopard Man of Skye (also Scotland). That would be awesome. Especially now that he's no longer a hermit - maybe he could move to the city?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3265474/Tattooed-Leopard-Man-leaves-hermit-lifestyle-behind.html
I made out with her twice once.
Twice.
I wonder how much water she retains after taking a bath while unpierced. You'd think she'd be like a sponge.
Hey, as long as she loves the look. Good for her for having the power to make her dream come true. If she wore all copper I wonder if she'd turn green all over?
I don't think she really has 6,000 piercings... more likely she's historically had a total of 6,000 piercings rather than having them simultaneously.
Where's Lizardman?
There's absolutely no way she has 6,000 piercings. If each piece of jewelery weighs half an ounce on average (a standard 16 gauge barbell weighs 0.64oz) , that's around an extra 180 pounds she's carrying around. And it looks like she might have more weight in dangley decorations than that even.
Even 462 is ~13 pounds of of jewelery.
Interesting regarding the weight. In any case, she has a "zillion" piercings. ; )
'worlds most surrounded by flesh piercings' more like.
http://images.google.com/images?q=unicorn
@5 Noen, @7 Zuzu
I had intended my comments to be tongue-in-cheek and I'm not expecting that we should ACTUALLY have legislation that prevents it. Upon re-read it doesn't come across that way.
She has a right to do whatever it is that she likes and I don't have any problem with that.
I like her weird indian goddess style, it's fierce and suits her. I just wonder how it's like to live with so many piercings, every day, I mean, you can't just pull a woolen sweater over all this without it getting stuck somewhere or get all tangled up. How do you sleep with so much metal?
Seems very uncomfortable.
Thanks for clearing that up, Jake. I was pretty surprised at the tone there for the first half or so of the posts; not what I would expect here at BoingBoing.
Teapunk, you sum up my feelings nicely. I love her makeup and hair especially; it somehow doesn't seem forced but like an over-the-top style -- I think because she seems so happy with it. But, yeah, it does seem like an awful lot of work to keep everything from getting tangled and caught on things.
Also, apparently she has internal genital piercings, which is new to me. I'm still processing that; the logistics of the actual procedure is, well, puzzling.
Sswaan - I did an interview with an individual with cervical and other internal piercings... It's got a lot of interesting commentary on post-gender as well. It's in my book, and you can download the PDF of it for free here:
http://www.zentastic.com/blog/opening-up/
"Ashley Crawford" is the one you want to check out.
Gosh! She doesn't like the act of getting pierced, but she seems to enjoy the tabloids...
http://trezende.wordpress.com
I'm not sure exactly how I feel about being paged in the comments when a post is made that involves body modification...I guess I am probably ok with it.
As for hygeine, nothing much more than basic hygeine is required for a healed piercing. Think about pierced ears, how many people have them and how do they keep them from causing health problems once healed? They simply maintain basic hygeine once healed, most without even thinking about it. With this extreme number a certain extra caution is warranted at least in the form of checkin them over for ones that may have been snagged, irritated, etc without notice and thus requiring some extra care.
HOLY C**P, thats her face ... took me a minute
to pass the airport security she needs to arive to airport couple of days earlier
...
also who would have knew human neck could carry all those metal
For those who keep going on about the airport, please realize that most quality body jewelry does not set off the basic detectors - even in large quantity. I used to often have fun with this by wearing a large 1/2 inch diameter spike in my septum and solid one inch pieces in my ears (titanium and SSS) to the airport so I could watch the scanners wonder if their machines were broken.
Odds are she walks right on through without any hassle except the people who want pictures and autographs
Thanks for the info, Shannon. Wow, piercing your own cervix. Just, wow. You know, the way Ashley describes creating some sort of landing strip for the G-spot sounds kind of practical.
I'm not sure exactly how I feel about being paged in the comments when a post is made that involves body modification.
They page me when the subject turns to butt plugs. I wouldn't complain if I were you.
"I'm not sure exactly how I feel about being paged in the comments when a post is made that involves body modification...I guess I am probably ok with it."
Dude! Lighten up! You got namechecked in a friendly way.
Takuan often gets called out in cephalopod threads..
He's a sucker for tentacles ..see what I did there? :)
Body mod always made me uneasy. It's really something, a strong sight, such things. I'd never do it, not even a single piercing, but a lot of it looks really nice on others, and I always liked to see people who are not afraid to do radical things, as weird as it may seem to the casual bystander.
But hey, I'm all for it. Just do whatever you want to do, as long as you're sure about it and won't regret it afterwards, no one has a say about those things other than the person who wants to do it. Some people just don't understand how to cope with different opinions, and those make Sartre so right when he said Hell is Other people.
Oh, covered.
I'll just get my coat..
and Arkie gets paged for this kind of thing
http://www.zombie-chiuaua.info/
Regarding the count of piercings, perhaps rather than the total pieces of hardware they're counting the surface piercings as 2 each since the epidermis has two holes in it. I dunno. Just speculating.
I thought I would miss my body jewelry when I ditched it around my 48th birthday. I'm thinking about going back to an earring but I see so many guys my age on whom it looks like a feeble grab at Youth. I will definitely not be reinstalling any others. I've gotten used to being able to employ a bath towel carelessly without incurring pain.
All Chiuauas look like that to me.
wish I could find a picture of Eric Idle punked to the mats with a giant safety pin through his head. "Corr, I got a bleedin' mate wi a brace and bit through hiz neck!"
I think it's kol that she did what she wanted with her life.
You know, I think its the face paint that I like the best. That blue shadow with the glitter flecks is pretty rad. That and the other colors make a bolder statement than the piercings, imo. I could never pull off a facial tattoo, but I wouldn't put it past me to don full face paint sometime. Is it still Mardi Gras?
I can't even sleep with earrings in because they grind into my neck. I wonder if the multi-pierced have fewer (or different) pain receptors, like capsaicin addicts tend to have a tiny fraction of the normal number of hot receptors on their tongues.
Hey, I'm a capsaicin addict - But I couldn't always tolerate extremely hot foods. My heat level has increased over the years, but I'd always assumed my pain tolerance was increasing or the endorphins were making the pain more tolerable. When I was a kid, crushed red pepper on pizza would burn me up
My fav heat source is a concoction I make - 1 part red savina habaneros, 1 part jalapenos, and 1 part thai chilis - finely chop all - add 1/2 apple cider vinegar 1/2 water to level of peppers in a pot, salt, heat until peppers soften a little - jar.
I still think it looks skanky, but people thought my long hair in '65 was skanky, so I don't judge the gal. It's her face, she can do what she wants with it. Mine ain't no better (but at least I can grow a beard).
My comments about being paged were meant to be lighthearted, once again I forget no one can see me smirking as I type (except, of course, the government monitors via the secret cameras)
If anything I am honored to be thought of as such
Never made out with Elaine, but have seen her internal piercings (8 in 2001, not 1000). She's quite hardwork to get along with. If you want to try she's usually running a stall on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh most days.
wait so she says she wants to change HERSELF to be HERSELF????? that doesn't make sense
I saw her crossing the street last week in Edinburgh, she had surprisingly mundane luggage.
Aunty Antinous said,"I can't even sleep with earrings in because they grind into my neck..."
Dude, try sleeping with studs instead of big ol pendants! heheheh
"I saw her crossing the street last week in Edinburgh, she had surprisingly mundane luggage."
When you look the way she does, you don't need fancy luggage.
I bet she swells up like a sponge in the bathtub; a new meaning to the phrase "it's all water-weight."
Wait a minute! Isn't that David Lee Roth from his Eat 'em and Smile days?
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around 1500 "internal" piercings? Does this mean she has rings in her peritoneum?
Jeff,
"Aunty Antinous"
That's Aunty Noose, I believe.
Entre nous?
Very nice Xophe!
Ant in ooze?
En t'nudes?
aprez vous
Enten use.
"Since Ents don't ordinarily employ tools of any kind, it's spectacularly foolish to manufacture a hammer specifically designed for Enten use."
I hereby coin the phrase (?, I can't find it similarly used):
nom de Spoon, (รก la: nom de plume).
But there is no spoon.
Curses!