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.