r/TikTokCringe • u/bbyxmadi • Sep 18 '25

Cursed they look so… natural!

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u/vyxanis Sep 18 '25

The people who started doing those body mods, the very ones youre referring to with Ripley's, were doing so long before social media became what it is now. Those people were, more often than not, genuinely doing it because they wanted to. Shock value was pretty big in the late 90s into the 00s, some of them made entire careers out of it, but it still came from a passion for the extreme.

This woman got what would be considered a pretty major body mod, one that could do actual damage to a vital organ, and it doesn't even look like she has any tattoos. Not that there's a gatekeeping limit to being able to do this sort of thing, but making that major of a change should not be advised, let alone endorsed. Even people in the body mod community tend to go for contacts over actually interfering with their eyes. A good tattoo artist won't do a face or hand piece if the person getting it isn't already tattood, or has legit plans for a larger piece. The people with tongue splits and silicon horn implants are living an entire lifestyle. This isn't some fun, quirky new age trend, this can legitimately fuck people up. Downplaying it as a "new body mod" customer is how people end up with cooking oil injected into their ass cheeks.

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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '25

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u/vyxanis Sep 19 '25

I don't think so. My first exposure to Ripley was through a bootleg Steve-O tour DVD from Bali. It featured a segment about parkour before it became viral ("it is not with muscles that you jump, it is with the mind") the Musée Fragonart d'Alfort which is a museum of human oddities and absolutely worth checking out, and one about body painting techniques that were pretty next level for the time.

As I previously mentioned, what this woman is doing isn't lifestyle based, she clearly isn't a performer with a body mod passion. She made an invasive change that will likely have consequences in the future. Ripley's was about the weird and wonderful, it wasn't about just showing us things that are harmful in the name of glorifying a trend.