Between world-threatening events like the hottest January on record and the epic fight between Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg, it may have slipped under your radar that three celebrities – Chris Brown, Amber Rose and The Game – have recently had their faces tattooed.
What could be inducing this face tattoo mini-epidemic? Is misinformation spreading on some sub-Reddit, somewhere, that face tattoos will prevent coronavirus? Or is it just stupidity? After all, Brown got a Nike trainer tattooed on his face, which at least perhaps confirms that karma is real, and self-inflicted. Rose had the words Slash and Bash tattooed on her forehead – which sounds like a cry for help until you learn one of her children is named Slash, and the other nicknamed Bash. (Which, actually, also sounds like a cry for help.)
And then there was the rapper who got Anne Frank’s face tattooed on his face. It’s almost as if those inclined to get a face tattoo are also inclined towards errors in judgment.
Why is this happening? Well, it could be to do with the rising popularity of tattoos. While getting a tattoo once was a rebellious act, today it’s commonplace. In 2016, a poll found almost a third (29%) of people in the US had a tattoo – up from 21% in 2012. Among millennials, they are even more ubiquitous – almost half (47%) said they had one. According to a Pew Research Centre report, tattoos were associated with deviant behavior as recently as a decade ago, but now they aren’t. You might even call tattoos mainstream.
If the raison d’être of any alternative culture is that it is (by definition) not popular, it stands to reason that people who like tattoos must find increasingly subversive ways to wear them. Certainly, a shoe on the face is subversive – in the same way that learning to sleep standing up is subversive. On the one hand, it is one way to make a very mainstream practice niche. On the other hand, why be different, when you could just be normal?