Body Modification: The Japanese BagelHeads

We are working on a post about different styles of body modification. As a warmup, we’d like to direct your attention to this odd story out of Japan. There’s a style of extreme body mod out there where people inject saline into their foreheads. We call them the Japanese BagelHeads.

Vice Magazine did an interview about the saline injection procedure. Ryoichi “Keroppy” Maeda, a photographer, journalist, and extreme body-mod expert, was interviewed. He said that the concept of saline infusions has been around since ’99, when Maeda brought it back to Japan after attending Modcon.

To become a bagelhead, take some saline solution and pump it into your forehead for about 2 hours. While you’re doing that, press your thumb into the middle of the forehead, which creates the “bagel/donut” effect. You’ll get the bagelhead “look” for a night; in about a day, your body has absorbed the saline, and everything is back to normal. So you can be a freak for the weekend and go back to work Monday like nothing ever happened. There seems to be no side-effects. Maeda mentions that sometimes people do “scrotal infusions” as well. (Good luck with that).

Congrats to the constantly-creative body mod experts, who have figured out how to make yourself look like a Star Trek alien for cheap!