Photo: Motel X Grace Neutral
Photo: Motel X Grace Neutral
Next, Grace had her belly button removed so her stomach would be completely smooth. But then she chose to get her face intentionally scarred. “They just cut and peel out strips of skin and then it heals obviously and leaves a scar and the scar is the pattern,” she said. “So they did that on my chin and my cheeks and my forehead. “I also have my ears pointed like a pixie and my earlobes removed so I have the tiniest, tiniest earlobes, like half a centimeter. I used to have big stretched ears and I didn’t want them any more; I wanted to look really ethereal and pixie-like.”
Photo: Grace Neutral/Instagram
But Grace’s scariest procedure yet is her eye tattoo, in which she dyed the whites of her eyes a light purple color. It’s a dangerous process that under 100 people have had done so far, and Grace admits that she found it ‘terrifying’. “I’m not going to lie, it was the hardest modification I’ve gone through but it was the least painful,” she said. “The eyes are so delicate and your sight is a really important thing so there’s a lot of risk involved and it’s not something you should take lightly. I really thought about it for a long time.” She eventually decided to go for it, because she felt like it would be the “final step” in her modification process to make her feel truly comfortable in her own skin.
Photo: Tumblr
“It’s all done by injection, so I’ve had like 12 injections each eye and each injection is like 15 seconds which doesn’t seem very long at all, but these small windows of time are so intense because you’re concentrating on not moving your eye so hard but there’s this uncontrollable fear inside you because you know that if you move you essentially could go blind.”
Photo: Grace Neutral Fan Page/Facebook
Grace believes she is done with body modification for now, but she might decide to go for more scarification in the future because she really enjoys the “ritual experience of cutting.” She’s happy with the way she looks now, and judging by the number of followers on her Instagram, lots of people admire her as well. The adulation of thousands earned her a London Fashion Week debut last year, when she took to the catwalk for designer Ashley Williams. She also teamed up with clothing label Motel to create her own range that includes body con dresses, relaxed fit tees, and ’90s inspired slip dresses.
Photo: Grace Neutral Fan Page/Facebook
Despite her success, Grace has also had to endure a lot of criticism for her bold choices. “Of course I’ve encountered negativity – I guess I’m an easy target,” she said. “People definitely have a fear of the unknown. There’s also a huge difference being a woman in this world. For men, people swallow it more easily but for a girl – they expect you to be this English rose – people come up to me and say, ‘Why would you want to do that to yourself? You’d be so pretty?’”
Photo: Motel X Grace Neutral
But Grace believes that many people have been very accepting of her unusual appearance, including her parents. “My parents got a bit freaked out about it, but they realized it wasn’t a phase, it was part of my identity,” she told Sang Bleu Magazine. “I had to go on, to find out more about myself. My dad’s a captain, so I can’t turn around and go in depth with him about how I think I’m a fairy from another space and time because he’d laugh! But I don’t feel like I have to, they get it and accept me for who I am.”“I feel like everyone is opening up to so many different types of beauty now,” she told The Debrief. “I don’t think everyone is going to start wanting to look like me, but it sends a message of wanting to look like yourself and it doesn’t matter, there are no boundaries there are no rules, no barriers, and there shouldn’t be. We all just need to express ourselves the way we feel comfortable.”
For those who are interested in following Grace’s beauty ideals, she has some pretty solid advice to offer. “Educate yourself and make sure that you research into your artist,” she said. “It’s like anything: if you were going to get your boobs done you would do your research and get the best doctor you could find. Body modification is so underground and it’s such a grey area when it comes to legality and stuff, you really have to be careful. Nobody wants to be cut up by a butcher, you want a surgeon!”
