A long time ago I made the mistake of answering the question “Is there anything that can’t be pierced” with “eyelids.” A few days later, someone got in touch and showed me a photo they’d taken while at a convention in Florida… it was of a man with pierced eyelids.

It turned out that by the time I saw the picture he had taken the piercing out and hadn’t had it redone, so I pretty much wrote it off as a one-off, a stupid human trick – and so did most of the piercers I spoke to about it. Even when I tracked the man down and he told me that he planned to have it redone and he’d only taken out in the first place because of a pollen allergy, I still don’t think I ever really took it seriously.

I never heard from him again so I don’t know whether he had it redone or not but since then more and more people with pierced eyelids have come out of the woodwork. It’s still not common – I would place it behind only cervix piercing in terms of rarity – but people are definitely getting their eyelids pierced and I’ve had the chance to talk to both piercers and those that have been pierced.

Joe Amato of Tatts Taylor Tattoos in Fort Lauderdale pierced his friend Kevin’s eyelid. He used a small set of sponge forceps with the grips polished off of so as not to damage the inside of the eyelid, and for the actual piercing he used handmade 3/8 of an inch needles to pierce from the inside of the lid out so as to avoid putting trauma on the lid.

Kevin said that although it was noticeably uncomfortable immediately afterwards and through the first night and the next morning it was it was “pretty swollen, uncomfortable, and slightly annoying” but once the eye dried out it the pain subsided.

He used a saline rinse three times a day to remove any debris in his eye and a H20cean spray, which has a salinity as close to tears as you can get, so spraying it in his eyes didn’t burn or cause any damage. He took a zinc supplement throughout the healing and Aleve (common painkiller) to reduce the swelling.

He told me that the second night he had trouble sleeping and that when he woke up the next morning there was “a large amount of pus” under his eyelid. He cleared it out with H20cean and a Q-tip, and it didn’t happen again. He said this his eye was swollen and felt bruised for a few days and it was mildly painful to close his eye completely or open it widely. As for how his actual eye felt, he described the sensation as just like having an eyelash caught under his lid.

Over the next few days the pain and redness subsided and he got used to the feeling although it was still irritating; by the end of the week it didn’t bother him and a week after that he said that he was completely used to it. He still uses H2Ocean several times a day to stave off infection, and eye drops when necessary.

And in case you’re wondering, it hasn’t caused him any problems with his vision whatsoever. In fact, he says that the only real problem he’s had is when he’s in a lift with people that shrink away from him because they’re horrified.