Aiko, who runs Burning Moon Body Art, has been a suspension facilitator since 2019 and is the organiser and host of Antwerp Suscon. ASC is currently the largest suspension convention in Northwest Europe, a title it’s held since the loss of Oslo Suscon (Organised by the sadly now defunct Wings of Desire — If you want a blast from the past, you can see a young and very handsome Matt Kirk suspending at the 2011 Oslo Suscon here).

ASC’s 2026 convention was its third ever — here are some of the highlights!

Thursday — Build Day

The build day was a great day for all the volunteers and most of the facilitators to chat and catch up with friends. Hanging the hard points was left to the brave souls who were willing to go up some very sketchy ladders! If you have the opportunity to volunteer with setup for a convention, I highly recommend it. Not only do you offer a welcome pair of extra hands, you also get to learn where the hell everything is — which is great when you end up feeling like Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Saviour because you happen to remember where the spare hand sanitizer ended up.

Friday — Morwen & Marcus

One of the first suspensions on Friday was my dear friend Morwen. She chose a horizontal side suspension, with nine hooks along her body from calf to shoulder, and a single supportive hook in her cheek. From an outsider perspective, this seemed like such a blissful position. Morwen looked totally at ease and comfortable, a different energy in comparison to her intense knee and thigh suspension of 2025. 

One of the first suspensions on Friday was my dear friend Morwen. She chose a horizontal side suspension, with nine hooks along her body from calf to shoulder, and a single supportive hook in her cheek. From an outsider perspective, this seemed like such a blissful position. Morwen looked totally at ease and comfortable, a different energy in comparison to her intense knee and thigh suspension of 2025. 

When interviewed, Morwen explained that this was quite a spontaneous suspension: 

“Suspending sideways wasn’t something I had first planned at Antwerp Suscon. Initially, I was to do a two-point back spinning beam, as I felt the desire for a fun, playful suspension this time. But due to last-minute schedule changes, that plan was moved to the next day, and thus that slot became free for me to do something else … 

I was a bit nervous about taking 10 hooks [instead of two]. For me, the more hooks, the more emotional release I experience. The vulnerability that comes with it is something I have difficulty showing to the outside world, [which is something I’m] actively trying to overcome. So this was an excellent opportunity to practice letting go of control …

Despite anticipating being emotional, I only briefly had my moment after Charlyne pierced my last hook, the facial one. The sensation of facial hooks runs deeper and touches layers other hooks don’t reach. 

Not only was this a very easy, comfortable suspension position for me, but I was actually giggling and laughing the majority of the time. I had tremendous fun swinging around while others around me laughed along with me. I am very happy with how it went. It turned out to be a more fun and playful suspension than I first expected. And I felt held and supported by the people around me. This was a lovely experience because I trusted my team, I trusted myself and my body, and I allowed myself to go with it. And I couldn’t be more grateful.”

Marcus was up next. I have had the privilege of piercing him a number of times (usually, although not intentionally, in the ass!). This year he chose to do a captive lotus inside Aiko’s ring rig. I love watching Marcus suspend — he is so stoic, and yet you can see all the emotions running through him. 

Speaking on his experience, he explained why he chose this position:

“Antwerp is a place where I want to do more complicated suspensions, because [the facilitators] are very knowledgeable about what can be done, and the space can energetically and physically support it. Last year on the train to Antwerp, I [found out] that a friend of mine had died. That is why I ended up doing the upside down position with the cheek spear in my mouth. This year, I wanted to celebrate the year that had passed and also do a similar sacrifice as last year to the friend that had died. When I was up, to me, it felt like time stood still. Paused. Life buffered. In the videos I saw, the first association I had was a loading symbol. I found that was fitting because life buffers during that weekend in Antwerp. Things happen that are very profound for the people there, but their day-to-day life takes a pause.”

I think anyone who has attended a suspension convention, especially one as intimate as Antwerp, can relate to that feeling of being taken out of space and time. Sometimes coming back to real life can feel like a rude awakening.

The Speedrun…

If you’ve ever attended a suspension convention , you know that being surrounded by your friends, blood brothers, and some of the best facilitators in the world can be the inspiration for some truly stupid ideas. This year, myself, Myjah, Nera, Dean, and Abi decided to see how quickly we could facilitate a two-point back, with predictably chaotic results.

The premise was to see how quickly we could clean, mark, pierce, rig, get off the ground, get down, and do post. Nera was our willing suspendee, having done an incredible six-point single forearm just hours before. As soon as Purklenz touched skin, the timer started.

The grand total of time was 7 minutes and 49 seconds. 

If anyone wants to try and beat that, please do let us know. Obviously, don’t be stupid. Wash your hands. We were being lovingly supervised by our long-suffering King of Clean, Daniel.

Saturday —Timon + Timon Performance

Facilitation lead by Pombo

I first met Timon at The Wee Scottish Piercing Expo 2026, but apparently he first met me at BMX 2025, watching me work in the suspension mega-crew. Time is strange like that. In my defense, I’m also terribly faceblind.  

Timon not only did two suspensions — a coma and subsequent two-point chest —  he also swallowed a sword on hooks, and then did a full magic performance all within approximately eight hours. Talk about efficiency!

Timon chose a coma suspension in the cube:

“For my coma suspension, I wanted all 13 piercings at the same moment. Awareness of my whole body’s sensation all at once interested me. The position itself attracted me because I believed that in a coma I could relax more fully than I was able to during other two-point suspensions. I did a two point-chest pull afterwards and swallowed a sword during this. 

I was curious to come back to my chest because, at another time, suspension from my chest had been a profound emotional experience for me. This time I didn’t find that depth, but I am glad I satisfied the curiosity I had for returning to that sensation. Maybe it would have been different had I stayed longer.”

Later that night, Timon returned to the main stage with a magic performance, including some of the most impressive balancing acts I’ve ever seen. I think he gets double points for balancing things on his bruised, swollen forehead. He also left a trail of bandages and cut pieces of cord across the stage, which we (Aiko, myself, and some other wonderful attendees) dutifully cleaned up. Diva behaviour. 

Explaining the reason he wanted to perform, Timon said: “My day job is being a magician, sword swallower, and juggler. I’ve wanted to be part of the Antwerp Suscon for a couple years, so I planned ahead and made it part of my tour this year —-making doing my show a perfect way to contribute to the event and show my love to the community.”

We love you too, Timon!

I first found BMEzine in 2004, through a former classmate who had just gotten her rook pierced. At the time, I had approximately 5 earlobe piercings, but wanted my nostril, belly button, and more, so finding a well of amazing, albeit underground, information had me firing up the family desktop after school that day and striking gold. Through BMEzine, I had found a place where it was not only accepted to modify yourself, but celebrated to actually do it. I took to Modblog and the BME Encyclopedia daily for years, never becoming a member, but knowing that it was a place where it wasn’t taboo to speak openly about my desires for body modification. I am forever grateful to that classmate.

I cannot speak for those who come from households such as I did, but body modification was the start of my liberation from the patterns and cycles I had been born into, albeit a painful one at the time. The creative career I was beginning to pursue was met with resistance, with responses like “there’s no money in that” or “you won’t be able to support yourself”, despite having family members that were gaining steam in the creative sector. Against these expressions of disapproval, I chose to study theatre, cultural productions through a feminist lens, as well as cultural anthropology. Creativity, culture, and expression were constantly on my mind.

When I went to get my second tattoo, a piece easily hidden on my hip, I began to receive thinly veiled warnings that I would be “written out of the will” if I went and wasted any more money on something so “frivolous”. Others claimed that tattoos would make me more unemployable than I already was due to my stretched ears and nose piercing. Looking back, this was a pivotal moment in terms of learning the lesson that family came with a cost, one that I would eventually see as far too high in terms of the exchange. Self-expression went against the culture established at home and was acceptable only within certain lenses.

A crisis in 2015 where I lost my documents, my home, a former partner, my health, and who I thought I was all led me to contact an old acquaintance I knew from years prior. He was now a tall, broad, heavily tattooed man who was creating via writing his first novel. The fact he was able to channel his creative energy with minimal support, as well as be bold enough to have tattoos on all four of his arms and legs? I was smitten, and it was our blossoming relationship that inspired me in February 2016 to start what would become my sleeve. As things progressed, it is now eleven years later and there are two constants around us: our creations and our body modifications. These two constants are so integral to who we are as individuals due to the intensity of self-expression they exude, and I know damn well they will always be a part of our relationship, lest it not survive. 

It was through my partner that I was introduced to a good friend of his, a tattoo artist who co-owns a shop in the city we currently reside in. This artist has done most of my partners work, as well as my favourite tattoo to date: my chest piece. It was also through both these men that the door was opened for me to meet other tattoo artists, piercers, and jewellers; all wonderful people who have inspired me to pick myself up and step out from the shadows to engage with the body modification community in terms of putting myself out there again. I thank them all for their inspiration and support. 

When one goes to get a piercing or tattoo, there is an expected level of discomfort and pain that accompanies the procedure before one gets to experience the finished result. In alchemy, it is similar. One cannot turn lead into gold or carbon into diamond without heat, finesse, pressure, and patience… at times in the extreme. While I am not a child anymore and things have changed, there are a few beliefs that will accompany me as I go about the rest of my days. These are my beliefs in the right to express oneself via body modification as safely and as informed as possible from their chosen practitioner, that one must educate them self on any experiences they wish to engage in before they seek out those experiences (help yourself and don’t be ridiculous), and that body modification practices be carried out as safely as possible, because people are going to engage with it anyways. We as a community must always prioritize safety. Do what you will, let it harm none. 

I was able to find self-expression, community support, and freedom from the upbringing that initially told me body modification would get me nowhere. And it is with the artists, as well as the modified creatives as a collective, that I ground my heart. For nowhere else have I met folks that are as passionate as to wear their creativity and hearts on their sleeves, literally.

The Origin

In 2004, Dana, Cole, and photographer Roger Doe (Circle23) collaborated on a beautiful concept. The idea was to create a corset piercing that went beyond the typical ribbon-laced corset piercings frequently seen within the body modification community. Dana shared that, during that time, he had “started experimenting with changing the shape of people’s bodies by using, for lack of a better term, industrial/mechanical means.” With a desire to explore what the body can do and what shapes it can take, the hope was to create a functional way of lacing the skin significantly enough to alter the shape of the subject’s body. Cole, who happens to have unusually stretchy skin and is a powerful human being in his own right, was up to the physical challenge and was excited to be a canvas for this experimental art form. The result was a striking and beautiful series of photographs documenting this new way to shape and manipulate the body.

More than two decades later, after many conversations about attempting it again someday, the new idea finally came to fruition. A different time, a different place, and entirely different terms.

Why Now?

Tiana, who had attended BLEED LIKE ME in 2025, had seen the original photograph by Roger on display in the gallery. But there was a name missing from the beautiful work. The photographer was named, the piercer was named, but the subject was not. After seeing the photograph, Tiana reached out to Cole, sparking the inspiration and momentum to revisit the piece because according to Tiana, it became increasingly clear how important it is to evaluate “the conversation around the subject-object shift that happens between the individual and then when they are on an image.” 

When asked what he hoped to accomplish this time around, Dana Dinius spoke of “bringing a bunch of new eyes and brains into expanding what bodies can do, or what art can be made with bodies.” Cole described it as “an opportunity to do the next version, not only on my terms, but on a set of terms that is for everyone to agree upon” and emphasized, “We’re all literally in this room together, and it wouldn’t be what it is without that fact.” And so, with Cole, Dana, and Tiana at the helm, the project took shape under the very appropriate title Subject/Object. 

Subject/Object

Rather than presenting art to a passive audience, Subject/Object invited attendees to participate in the creative process while examining the relationship between the person whose body is used to create the art and the person creating it, both critical to the outcome. The room was full of observers excitedly waiting to watch something that, almost certainly, most had never seen before. Photographers, videographers, community members, and curious individuals were all gathered to witness the experience.

Fifteen feet of 3/32-inch plastic-coated steel wire rope threaded through twelve piercings made with 8-gauge needles, and a beautiful, steady, brave, present Cole at the center of it all. The work culminated in an impactful experience for everyone in the room. It was an honor to witness the many emotions Cole experienced throughout the lengthy preparation and execution of the corset. There was the familiarity of doing it again, alongside the new experience of revisiting the work in a different time, in a different body, and within a different dynamic.

The crew was supportive and skilled, the musical soundscape created by the talented Minus Man set a beautiful tone for the event, and the captivated audience helped hold an encouraging environment for it all to unfold. After the lengthy process of creating the cable corset, Cole graciously invited those interested in taking photographs, shooting video, or simply observing to offer direction and input on positioning, lighting, angles, and more.

After many hours of this generous collaboration, Dana and Tiana removed the cable. Tiana then applied cupping cups to each entry and exit wound before the team carefully cleaned and cared for Cole, bringing the performance to a close.

I genuinely hope to see more beautiful collaborations like this in the future. Congratulations to everyone involved. It was truly a gift to witness.

– Hilary Whitmore

Update: BME Encyclopedia is down temporarily due to a bot net attack.

Comments Are Back!

Comments are now enabled for new posts and we’ve improved the template with our own custom avatars using the BME heart design studio. It’s not a complete gravatar implementation, nor do I think we need one, but we feel like it adds a little more visual interest and branding. The solution is completely private with no cookies or tracking of any kind.

Additionally, we have cleared out almost 150 thousand duplicate comments from previous imports and content recovery efforts. This reduction has already improved the site performance overall, not to mention the reading experience of legacy articles.

BME Encyclopedia

The BME Encyclopedia was a fantastic community driven resource for information and knowledge on the of body modification, the people who drove our culture and industries, our past and our present. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, data loss and poor maintenance much of the content is now outdated, poorly formatted or broken due to incomplete recovery efforts.

We believe that the BME Encyclopedia should be a true knowledge base for our community and it should be integrated into the primary website, along side relevant content, rather than on a separate site. Descriptions, references, and risks should be visible, or easily obtainable, and relevant to the content you’re browsing.

As part of our revival project, we have exported over four thousand articles and media files from the wiki into a new system and we have re-categorized all of the pages so they will map to actual relevant content on BME.

We hope to unveil the new encyclopedia before the end of the year and allow additional community members to come in and help us rebuild and redefine the modern era of body modification knowledge.

Update: With the recent botnet attack I’m pushing to try and get the new wiki up as soon as possible.

Are You Experienced?

The written experiences of our community are yet another piece of BME’s history that we’ve lost over the years. With the recent invention of Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative text accepting these types of submissions becomes a nightmare.

We want real human-written experiences, and trying to prove these submissions are genuine is a serious burden. We do not want our archives to be filled with fake generated experiences, nor do we want you to waste your time reading them if they are, but we also recognize that the written word is crucial component of how humans record their lives, culture, and history.

We are accepting new written experiences submissions- and new ModBlog writers for that matter- however at this time there is a strict vetting process where we will want to get to know you a bit first, look at some writing samples, and potentially discuss topics of interest that fit. So before you submit anything please reach out to council@bme.com and introduce yourself.

IAM Private Beta

We have been quietly running an IAM beta since August with a handful of test users. Thanks to them we have worked out some of the core concepts, category hierarchy, and user experience issues. They’re an invaluable bunch! Unfortunately the beta itself hasn’t seen many updates as I’ve been managing a lot of things including a personal move out of a rental property. The majority of the effort is going into Project Phoenix, which will (eventually) be the software project running all of BME.

If you’re interested in helping with the IAM beta testing or helping influence some of our development process please reach out to me personally (jon@bme.com). This is not an open invite, we’re looking for only a handful of users.

Memberships & Age Verification

Many people have written in and asked me personally about when BME memberships are coming back. The answer is honestly unclear, and many people mean different things when they’re asking about membership so I will try to break it down.

Firstly, BME must comply with age verification laws in order to remain viable. As such all memberships (any registered account) will require age verification (18+) through a third-party prior to registration. We are currently implementing Didit as that provider with the strictest privacy settings possible so that your data is not stored beyond the verification process. That process will be a live face scan for age estimation and if inconclusive you may be asked to scan a photo ID to complete the process. BME receives no information about you other than a verification pass or fail, we do not receive or retain and personally identifiable information.

Secondly, obtaining a merchant account to charge for memberships is an even greater hurdle that’s dependant on the first for compliance reasons. Then there’s the matter of content and meaningful value in return for your money. At this time we don’t have the content or the platform to support either but we are working on both content recovery and new content creation channels. We hope to have a clearer picture some time next year.

Finally, if you wish to support BME through this period your best options are submissions, purchases from BMEshop, and our Patreon.

My dear friend Abi turned 26 a few months ago, and to commemorate the achievement we decided to do something a little different.

I’d done a set of play piercings for Abi before. Seventeen 20g needles across her chest. A fun taster of what play piercing could be like. She loved it. So for her 26th, it seemed fitting to do something a little more ambitious — and do some trespassing while we were at it.

Packing a full piercing kit,including sterile gloves, into a backpack was a little bit challenging — I’m used to having a full folding table. But pack I did, and Abi, Gwen, and I drove a ways to a beautiful, if creepy, abandoned cottage out in the sticks. I was immediately grateful that I packed a head torch as we climbed through a broken window into the dim living room.

We chose the abandoned bathroom as the piercing spot, and I set up a clean plasticked area to work from. Gwen was in charge of listening for Unusual Noise, helping us stay clean, and keeping us generally sane. Couldn’t have done it without them.

We chose to use 26 3” 16g blades. Abi had her headphones in to listen to music as I pierced a collar on her neck, fans on her cheeks, and a crown on her forehead.

Abi chose to free bleed in the bathtub. Which wasn’t bolted down, we found out! 

After we were finished, we spent a good 30 minutes cleaning to make sure we left no hazards for anyone else to deal with. Leave no trace applies to blood, too.

Technical piercer nonsense out of the way, I’ll now leave you to enjoy Abi’s firsthand account of her experience!

From the Horses Mouth

“I am not a fan of my birthday — it is simply a day I have never enjoyed and has historically been marked by a lot of pain. That being said, when Kit suggested we do something painful to mark the occasion, it felt fitting — ‘What better way to mark a day that has always caused me so much pain?’ I thought. 

So, being a sucker for a fun location, I got to work finding abandoned buildings in our area. I found dozens of places and explored them all, but one place stuck out — an old decaying building in a small, forgotten town. I can’t quite explain, but this place felt right. We marked our calendars and waited for the day to come.

I woke up on the morning of my birthday to a familiar feeling: a unique combination of grief, shame, dread and resentment that stares back at me in the mirror every year. It’s the type of feeling that fights itself. Exposed yet unseen, suffocating yet desolate. Your heart feels both everything and nothing at the same time. You don’t know whether to scream or to sob — so you do both. 

This time, though, I felt something new. Something I couldn’t quite name. I paused for a moment to savour the change before quickly getting myself in order and getting out the door to go pick up Kit. 

Once we arrived at the building and picked our room, I sat in silent thought while I watched Kit prepare the piercing area. The pain would be fun, but I was unsure of what emotions might come up. I wondered if this was the right decision — ‘What if it’s all too much?’

I took the final few minutes before we began to reassure myself. Kit knows me better than almost anyone else. Whatever emotions came up, I knew they would be right here with me, needles in hand, to keep me grounded. I lay on the floor, I put on the most fitting album I can think of — The Greatest Generation by The Wonder Years, and we began. 

As the first needle made its way through my neck, the flash of pain calmed my thoughts. I am brought out of my head and into the room. I am lying on an old, decaying floor accompanied by my closest friends. I am calm, and I am present. Kit checks in on me, but all I can manage is a smile and a ‘mhm.’

As we continued and settled into a rhythm, I thought back on what had led me to this moment. It has been less than a year since my first suspension, and in that time this community has given me everything I could’ve ever wanted. My relationship with pain, like most in this community, is complicated. I had all too often found pain used against me, and this community has given me a space to reclaim that. My first suspension came at a time where I needed it most, and the community I’ve found has become everything to me. A community where my relationship with pain is understood and I can indulge in painful activities without fear of judgement, without feeling the need to explain myself. I had finally found a place that felt like home. I looked up at Kit, who had just grabbed another needle, and I realised how lucky I am to have someone I can trust like this. 

As we finished on my neck, we took a small break to laugh at how the needles moved around my throat as I spoke before I lay back down and we got started on my face. I was happy now, and I think it showed, as Kit had to tell me to keep a straight face so they can hit their marks properly. I tried my best to contain myself, and before I knew it, we were finished. We ran around the building taking a few photos, and then we moved onto The Bathtub. 

After carefully climbing into the bathtub, we removed the needles from my face and neck. I closed my eyes and sank into the calming warmth making its way down my face. There wasn’t a single thought in my head, and I was at peace. I don’t know how long I was sitting in the bathtub, but after a few photos, we were done. We cleaned the blood off my face and packed up the piercing area before making our way back out of the building.

Upon reflection, I think this play piercing will stick with me for the rest of my life. Using pain to create joy and laughter and peace on a day that is usually marked with anguish has taught me just how fantastic a tool pain can be. When I look back on that day, I smile and think to myself ‘I hope I can do something like this again next year.’

I am not a fan of my birthday, but I was a fan of this one.”

Abi, Kit and Gwen form Glass Fang Suspensions, a young suspension crew based in the East Midlands of England. You can check out our work here.

LOVE.BME.COM is a simple single page application where you can create your own custom BME heart logo. You can save your custom palettes and images, create stickers for other messaging apps, and most importantly don’t forget to share with those you love.

To all my friends helping and supporting me and this project. Thank you.

I love you.

In “Queer tattooing: archives of spatial belonging, bodily autonomy, resistance and community”, Dr. Rikke Andreassen, Sara Swanson, Dr. Marie Lunau, Sofia Bakhsh, and Del LaGrace Volcano add to our understanding of tattoo history by exploring various dimensions of lesbian and queer women’s tattoo history and contemporary practice. The article takes a multi-dimensional approach, drawing on the authors’ differing entry points into this work. Swanson, a tattoo artist, first started conducting interviews as part of a search for elder queer tattooers. Andreassen is a professor of media and culture whose recent work involves extensive archival research that reveals often-overlooked histories of queer women.

“I think all of us have a passion for community,” said Andreassen. “Especially when it comes to the history of queers, or lesbians, or trans people, often it becomes a very individual history, because queer history is often based on testimony … To us, community was very important, so that was a connecting point.”

The first part of their article focuses in on the significance of queer spaces, especially for such a vulnerable practice as tattooing, or body modification generally. Rather than viewing queer tattooing narrowly as relating only to the imagery of the tattoo, they expand it to capture the impact of being tattooed in a queer space, in community with other queer people.

The necessity of a queer space is made more salient by the negative experiences queer people can face at a mainstream tattoo studio. Rather than requiring someone to hide aspects of themselves for safety, a queer studio allows queer people to be tattooed as themselves.

“It has to do with being able to be comfortable in your body,” Swanson said. “Also your ideas. You come with something really personal that you want to do, and you need a good experience.”

Being tattooed has also historically marked individuals as non-normative and resistant, an aspect the article explores by drawing on 19th-century records from a Danish medical doctor, Rudolph Bergh, who had a particular interest in tattoos. At the time, very few women were tattooed, and the practice was heavily associated with crime, especially sex work. Many women received tattoos in prison, which was also a space where women could be exposed to the possibility of lesbian relationships. Tattoos of a lover’s name were common, and while male names were more common, a number of tattooed women sported the names of their female lovers, or even their own names.

Bergh positions both tattooing and lesbianism as immoralities to which younger women could fall prey during imprisonment, a viewpoint which skews his records. They are also tainted by his lack of concern for consent — the women whose tattoos he recorded did not always want to speak to him. Andreassen characterizes Bergh’s documents as a “violent archive” and, in her work with it, highlights how women exercised their agency in that situation by denying Bergh information, one of the only powers they could assert.

As often happens in historical research, flawed materials like Bergh’s archive are all we have. There are no surviving accounts created by the women themselves.

“There’s so much lost,” Andreassen said. “We know that these women wrote letters, we know they wrote diaries. But in order to keep such sources, you typically need to have a very rich family with a house and an attic where you can have letters laying for 100 years. And working class people did not have that.”

Taking class into consideration, the act of a woman tattooing her lover’s name on her body takes on additional significance, Andreassen points out. While a wealthier woman might commission a painting of their lover or carry her hair in a locket, a working class woman would not have had those options. The most valuable thing she owned was her own body, which was also her means of economic survival, whether through labor in a factory or sex work. In this context, tattoos of a lover’s name serve as a type of reclamation, an assertion of ownership over one’s body in the face of structures which denied poor women that power.

The function of tattoos as an assertion of autonomy continues to be important for marginalized communities who experience limitations on bodily autonomy. A relevant case in the queer community is that of people seeking medical transition, who often face long waitlists to access care and require the approval of one or more doctors before proceeding with treatment. To receive care in the medical system, they must offer an account of their gender that is legible to a medical professional who is overwhelmingly likely to be cisgender.

It’s not surprising that body modification can be an appealing way to exert control over one’s body in such a situation. In the article, Swanson describes a round-table event during Trans Fest Stockholm where people spoke about their motivations for being tattooed:

“Many of those who shared their stories spoke about tattooing as making a decision no one else could alter. When it is done, it is done. It is a decision you cannot take back — it is permanent.”

Despite the ways in which tattooing has changed over time, the historical experiences of queer women resonate with individuals today. After Andreassen published a book on queer women in the past, which also included the 19^th century tattoos, people took inspiration from it and had designs from it tattooed on themselves. Andreassen herself grew to feel so close to the women whose stories she researched that she got her own tattoo — her first — inspired by the historical designs, and created by Swanson.

The type of queer history that Andreassen and Swanson highlight in their article is less commonly discussed — middle- and upper-class narratives dominate, primarily due to the wealth of sources available. Pulling stories from archives like Andreassen does is time-consuming, but she finds it important to create a more diverse understanding of historical queerness.

“It can be a problem if the only stories we get are these like nice middle class stories, because it’s also important to us as a community — as queers, as lesbians, as dykes, whatever we identify as — to have a much more nuanced history” Andreassen said. “It’s important for us to have history where we can see reflections of our community and recognize ourselves.”

The same chemical that powered the glow-in-the-dark stars in your childhood bedroom has found its way into the hands of scarification artists, and it looks sick. 

While the technique isn’t new, per-se, the doped strontium aluminate powder became much easier to obtain this summer, after two online biohacking shops began selling it. Since then, it’s been popping up across online body modification spaces — and, for me, in real-life body mod circles. 

Any emerging modification will come with question marks, but this one has additional baggage from its visual similarity to ultraviolet-reactive tattoos. While the two rely on different phenomena to create light, I’ve seen a lot of skepticism towards glow scars come from concerns about UV inks’ reputation. 

With its popularity only going up, I wanted to find out how glow-in-the-dark scarification is done and what we know about the risks of experimenting with strontium aluminate. 

The Mod

Like with every new mod, artists are experimenting with different methods to see what works (and what definitely doesn’t). The gist of the procedure is fairly obvious: cut the skin and put powder in the wound. And while that will probably result in a glowing scar, it’ll likely be fainter and patchier than you’d prefer — plenty of early DIYers have found themselves having to recut to get results they’re happy with. Based on reported experimentation and the words of an experienced scarification artist who’s done a handful of these procedures over the last year, there’s additional work that goes into making and healing bright, consistent scars.

The Cutting

The modification artist I spoke to has been leaning towards using shallower, thinner cuts than he’d typically use for scarification. Usually, the goal of scarification is a noticeable raised scar — deep, wide cuts help make it happen. In this case, however, getting a consistent result means keeping the wound packed with powder throughout healing.

“I tried to make more of a v-cut style incision with the scalpel blade, so when I packed it with the powder, it closed up a bit easier rather than staying open and creating a richer scar,” said the artist I spoke to. “I made the executive decision to try doing cuts that would not necessarily scar as good as a scarification artist would traditionally like, but have it heal faster to help hold in the powder.”

Though there are some individuals using glow powder in skin peel scarifications, they appear to be relatively new artists and DIY biohackers rather than experienced scarification artists, which makes it difficult to identify what problems may come from the skin peeling itself rather than issues with cutting depth and placement. Like with many aspects of this mod, we’ll need to wait and see before drawing conclusions.

The Healing

Regular scarification often benefits from specific aftercare to irritate the wound. Strontium aluminate scarification doesn’t — the leading method currently seems to be keeping the wound covered with Tegaderm/Saniderm and undisturbed until it’s completely scabbed over, while reapplying powder daily. But like with any modification, the artist I spoke to cautioned that even perfect aftercare doesn’t guarantee a specific outcome.

“It’s just the way the body heals — sometimes it pushes it out, sometimes it retains it,” he said. “You can’t really force it in … There’s only so much that we can do to try to make it accept and hold onto what we want.”

I spoke to a woman who received glow scarification about six months ago, a teal single-line heart at the center of her chest. Though she was told what to expect, she wasn’t prepared for what the healing would actually look like. 

“The powder consistency would become almost like a gel,” she said. “The first few times I packed it, I was like, ‘I’m getting nauseous, this is scaring me.’ Because it looked like pus.”

After a few days, she realized activating the powder with a UV light made reapplications easier to stomach. She kept the wound covered and continued re-applying powder for just over two weeks, until she was sure it was closed.

Though she loves her scar, she also notices a few of the unavoidable irregularities that come with scarification — one side is more raised, the other slightly thicker. Six months out, though, she says she’d definitely do it again, and looks forward to hopefully having more color options in the future.

“I’m wanting to go in and try the pink, just because I don’t think anyone’s done the pink yet,” she said. “And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work! You still end up with a cute scar.”

The Powder

As mentioned, strontium aluminate is the same chemical used in glow-in-the-dark stars, as well as other children’ s toys. To be specific, it’s strontium aluminate combined, or doped, with other elements — usually europium and/or dysprosium — that allow it to glow. 

Doped strontium aluminate lights up through a process called phosphorescene. When certain wavelengths of light hit the compound, they add energy to the system, which is stored — think of this like throwing a ball in the air. Once it is no longer lit, the strontium aluminate ‘wants’ to return to its normal energy level, like a ball in mid-air ‘wants’ to fall back to the ground. The extra energy is released as light, and the strontium aluminate will continue to glow until it returns to a normal energy state.

The elements combined with strontium aluminate determine what color it will glow. However, different colors of light have different amounts of energy, so some colors glow for far longer than others. 

Currently, body-safe powders only exist in green, blue, and teal. Other options could eventually be on the table, but require more testing as they use different elements than the existing options and, according to Amal Graafstra of Dangerous Things, may not be compatible with the phosphate passivation they’re using.

Safety

Like with most experimental modifications, the biggest question surrounding glow scars is long-term safety. There are now a few dozen people who have had glow scars for a period of months — the longest I’ve heard is a year — but nothing further.

Luckily, strontium aluminate doped with europium and dysprosium has been the subject of multiple scientific studies looking into using it for medical scans. While the placement of and exposure time to the strontium aluminate is very different from what we see in glow scars, the research gives us an idea of potential concerns and insight into how medical professionals minimize them. 

Biostability

Finding materials that won’t be broken down or otherwise affected by the human body is a common theme in body modification, from using titanium jewelry in piercings to coating magnet implants with silicon. For strontium aluminate, the process of making it body-friendly is a microscopic one.

While it won’t dissolve in water, strontium aluminate can break down if it’s submerged. The things it breaks down into — aluminum hydroxide and strontium hydroxide — aren’t recognized as particularly harmful, but they don’t glow, so water-resistance is critical for long-lasting use of strontium aluminate. 

Currently, the two methods used to make strontium aluminate water-resistant are silica coating and passivation. Silica coating is what it sounds like — each molecule of strontium aluminate is encapsulated in a thin layer of silica. Because it’s bio-compatiable, silica won’t react to the body’s tissues and can keep the strontium aluminate protected. A similar process called phosphate passivation surrounds the strontium aluminate with phosphorus. While both are considered bio-safe, biohacking webshop and forum Dangerous Things switched from offering silica-encapsulated to phosphate-passivated powder in August, citing concerns about silica crystal ‘shards’ remaining in the product. 

Findings

Unlike with most experimental mods, we have medical research into the safety of strontium aluminate — and it looks promising.

Strontium aluminate is among a class of materials which have been studied for potential use in medical imaging. These materials are interesting candidates for bioimaging, a type of imaging that looks at the body’s functions, such as how long the stomach takes to empty after a meal. 

Unfortunately, there have not yet been publicized human trials of strontium aluminate’s effects on the body — existing data uses mice and cultured human cells to examine potential consequences. These ways of testing aren’t perfect representations of how an actual human body will respond. If mouse studies could always be generalized to humans, we would be well on our way to curing cancer.

That said, the studies which do exist can help to temper concerns about strontium aluminate. The most straightforward is toxicity — does it damage surrounding tissue? Not acutely, at least: cells exposed to silica-coated strontium aluminate for 48 hours were no more likely to die than controls. And researchers saw no defects when looking at exposed cells under a microscope. This lines up with what we’ve seen in early glow powder scarification — so far, there’s no sign of tissue damage. Similarly, mice injected with silica-coated strontium aluminate had no ill effects detectable through observation or post-mortem examination after two weeks. In a separate experiment, they also found that the mice’s bodies had cleared the strontium aluminate after 16 days. 

There’s (always) risk

Bodies are complicated systems, and like with everything we choose to put into ourselves, there’s no guarantee that strontium aluminate is as safe as it currently seems. Because glow scarification only involves a small amount of powder in the dermis, the artist I spoke to doesn’t expect any significant amount to end up in vital organs — if anything, he says, the body will more likely push it out. 

It’s clearly enough reassurance for many DIYers and the few artists beginning to offer it, creating a frontier for experimentation that we’ll hopefully look back on fondly. It’s part of why the woman I spoke to decided to get it done — she loves the look, but she’s also excited to be part of the communal discovery process that builds our modification knowledge. 

“Even if, let’s say 5-10 years from now, you’re like, ‘holy shit, that is crazy that anyone thought it was okay,’ I don’t think I would regret it,” she said. “For me, whether it’s completely safe or not, it was worth it. I think it’ll always be something I’m glad that I did.”

Jason LaJudice was an artist and engineer before he ever touched suspension, and the community is richer for his contributions. His death on June 1, 2026 is a loss to those that loved and knew him, to everyone who, knowingly or unknowingly, has suspended from his equipment, and to those who never had a chance to learn from or laugh with him.

At the end of his life, Jason was concerned about legacy — he did not want to be forgotten. North American suspension is in a revival period after years of stagnation, and, like any culture, our collective memory atrophies without active reinforcement. People drop out. Stories stop being told. Names are forgotten. Newer practitioners come in and know people like Jason only as names, if at all. It’s now easy to take for granted pieces of equipment he created, an ironic testament to the scale of his impact on the community. And on the people around him — Jason was a relentless prankster, but also knew the right moment to offer genuine, meaningful advice. No one was a stranger to Jason, and his automatic friendliness made the community more welcoming to some who needed it. 

His connection to others in the community is inseparable from his contributions to it. Jenn Neal, a long-time friend of his, said Jason was often driven by seeing how his friends would use his creations.

“It actually was part of why he pushed so hard to make all this really intense, interesting stuff — the triads, the angel rigs — because he wanted to see what his friends could do with it,” Jenn said. “That spirit is really what helped drive so much of his innovation.”

It also drove his pranks. Everyone had a story to add — the dildo shoes, the surprise fish, the blow-up doll police officer. Jason brought his tendency to overengineer things to his pranks. They took planning, preparation, and sometimes technical skill. He’d weld metal contraptions around liquor bottles that made them impossible to drink from. He’d use a label maker to print out stickers reading “This has been in my ass,” and leave them absolutely everywhere he could.

“God forbid you left your car, truck unlocked, he would go through your vehicle and put them all over the place,” said Stewart Stephens. “You’d find them on your shoes. You’d find them on your vehicle. You’d find them on any of your rigging gear. He would just place them all over the place, and then when you found them and told him, he was like, “Yeah, you haven’t found them all yet.” They’re still turning up.”

Jason would often look at something and think he could do it better — he was usually right. His collection of RC cars was dominated by super-modified, Jason-improved versions. 

“He always modified things and built them up,” said Stewart. “That was Jason. He always took something apart. ‘I can do this better, this is crap, I can build this better.’”

Some of the suspension equipment he created came about this way. His take on the gilson hook, the gorilla hook, is visibly sturdy and high-quality, but was affordable enough to allow teams to stock up for events. Or the angel rig, a curved rod with eyelets down its length. It was an improvement on a previous piece of equipment, a C-shaped rig with straight sides that came off at an angle. The angle rig curved smoothly. More attachment points meant new possibilities for more intricate rigging, for artistic ropework. Positions like a coma or lotus became easier to rig, and more accessible. Like with the gorilla hook, Jason tried to keep the price of angel rigs down. As a one-man production team, he created so many that they became a staple item for suspension teams. 

Creating safe suspension equipment isn’t easy. Few people have both the technical skill and interest to do it. As a helicopter engineer by day, Jason knew more than enough. There is no real financial reward for it, either — suspension was and remains a small community. 

“Theres no money in suspension,” said Allen Faulkner, founder of Traumatic Stress Discipline, the group with which Jason first suspended. “There never was. There never will be. So when it comes to things like designing components, equipment, and such. It’s really a labor of love.”

The human gyroscope — Jason’s preferred term for it — is his most ambitious project. Like other equipment he created, the idea wasn’t thought up from scratch. The elegant, easy-to-use magnetic triad hooks were originally drawn up by Allen Faulkner. Jason took the sketch, improved it, and made it real. So it went with the gyroscope: the hypothetical of a suspension with multi-axis rotation, something in constant flux, was floating around the community by the early 2000s. In 2014, it became a reality at Dallas SusCon, built by Jason with help from Tom Moore and Jared Anderson.

“It’s something that people had been conceptualizing for a while,” said Kevin Donaghy, founder of the Ontario Suspension Collective. “But Jason was the one that took that topic of discussion, that really interesting conversation topic, and made it a reality.”

Despite his characteristic over-engineering and attention to safety, Jason considered the gyroscope to be the single most dangerous piece of suspension equipment ever created. It’s a modified amusement ride that has to bear an ever-shifting weight. Constant motion means there are countless ways things can go wrong, and it takes time to stop the rings’ motion. In his write up about its creation, Jason described the gyroscope as the most evil contraption he’d ever designed. 

It’s a testament to the community’s trust in Jason that so many people felt comfortable getting into the gyroscope at all. The faith in him is well-earned — to date, the gyroscope has continued to operate as designed. No equipment made by Jason is known to have failed, outside of destructive testing. 

“He had such a confidence about what he was doing,” said Sasha Belenkiy, founder of the Denver Suspension Collective. “He was like, ‘nobody has thought about this as much as I have, and if somebody thinks they have a stronger hook than I do, let’s have a tug of war.’” 

The gyroscope went on to thrill/terrorize suspendees and spectators alike for three years. After its sale in 2017, it fell off the map. Jason was relieved. 

“The gyroscope, that was kind of the bane of his existence,” said Allen Faulkner. “He was responsible for bringing the gyroscope in, but then he lost sleep over that because it’s so dangerous. When the gyroscope kind of disappeared, he was super happy about that because he didn’t want anybody to get hurt.”

For more than eight years, the gyroscope, and that particular fear, lay dormant. 

In late 2025, after hosting the inaugural Ontario SusCon, Kevin Donaghy began discussing plans to bring the gyroscope to the 2026 SusCon. In January 2026, he flew out to see it in St. Louis. After almost a decade in storage, there were concerns it may no longer be safe to operate. Despite some cosmetic wear, it ran as well as it ever did. Kevin made plans to have it brought to Toronto for the April event.

By this time, Kevin and others in the community had peripheral knowledge of Jason’s ongoing health issues. Kevin hadn’t reached out to Jason about bringing the gyroscope to Canada — both out of reluctance to bother him at that time, and some concern that Jason might try to dissuade him from bringing the gyroscope out of retirement. After Kevin publicly confirmed the gyroscope would be at the 2026 SusCon, Jason reached out, offering his guidance and intimate knowledge of the gyroscope as its creator.

“He was really excited about it, and pretty much on that first call we began talking about the idea of him coming to Ontario, but his health really began to go downhill,” Kevin said. “[The event] was about four months out from when I was connecting with Jason about the gyroscope, and he didn’t know if he was going to be here at that time.”

Two weeks out from the event, Jason confirmed he was going. He would be there to see the gyroscope’s first run in years, something everyone in attendance was excited for. Bunny, one of the two people who had driven the gyroscope up from St. Louis, was the first to take it for a spin. 

“Indigenak told me LaJudice was going to be watching and to give him a show — let’s see this in action and just have fun,” Bunny said. “It brought me to tears. And I could see it brought him to tears. I saw, like, this is a huge privilege. This is an honor to have the first run.”

Beyond the gyroscope, Jason’s legacy was visible throughout the event. People who had learned from him. People suspending off of angel rigs. A continuous spinning beam with an engine leveler, a device that makes it easy to change the fulcrum of the beam, allowing people of different weights to suspend safely from both ends. Before Jason, it didn’t exist. Now, it’s standard for spinning beams. 

“Of all the things about the SusCon this year that were meaningful — and there was a lot — having Jason and Ivy, [his wife], there was the most,” Kevin said. “I know it meant the world to him, too, being able to see so many of the people that were there one last time, and see the gyroscope in action again one more time. It was an opportunity for him to immerse himself in the legacy that he had created, and that he was leaving behind.”

In the program guide for the 2026 Ontario SusCon, Kevin included an article on Jason’s contributions to the community with a focus on the gyroscope. Sasha included the same text in a pamphlet distributed at Denver SusCon, after talking to Jason and hearing that he didn’t want to be forgotten. 

“The thing that feels important to me right now is just to make sure that people know about his legacy,” he said. “So many of the things we use are things he has touched in some way, directly or indirectly. These are hooks that he stood there polishing, and we get to suspend off of them still. His fingerprints are all over the things that we do.”

Some of Jason’s contributions are less visible than equipment. He taught classes across SusCons, influencing the practice of dozens or hundreds of facilitators. It’s how Sasha started talking to him — Jason taught a 2016 class on hook de-barbing, and Sasha reached out later to make sure he was doing things right. 

Jason also helped create the first professional standards for suspension rigging, with a committee that included Stewart Stephens. The American National Standards Institute guidelines for aerial performers now include considerations for suspension performers, the first professionalized guidelines for the practice, developed over five years. 

But despite Jason’s immense contributions to suspension, it was only part of his life. While it’s easy to view him through the lens of suspension, especially as someone in the community, he cannot be reduced to a single aspect. 

“Jason had a drive and passion for suspension, but it was only a part of him,” said Allen Faulkner. “There was so much more to him, and I feel like people try to give him this box of ‘he was a suspension guy.’ No, he was way more than that. He was an artist, a family man, a creative, a designer, an engineer. There are so many more facets to him that when people try to put him in this little box of being a suspension practitioner, it’s just a very small part of him.”

Jason was a lifelong artist, winning art competitions as early as his grade school years. Later, as an adult, he won so many sculpture competitions that he was asked to be a judge — he declined, saying it was more fun to keep winning. He created impressive costume masks with built-in special effects, combining artistry and engineering. His home was full of his artwork, sculptures often featuring metal tubes bent in flowing, organic undulations that appear so graceful as to conceal the practical challenge of forming metal into such soft shapes. Jason succeeded in aviation engineering, an exacting, precision-focused field. 

On a trip to Oslo for a suspension convention, Jason led a small group, including Sasha, on a day trip to the Emanuel Vigelands museum, where visitors have to let their eyes adjust to a dark room so as not to disturb the light-sensitive wall paintings. Sasha remembers Jason’s excitement at getting to show the little-known museum to the group. 

“You can hear about the contributions in these objective ways, but you don’t really get the charm of interacting with a person, and it’s hard to communicate from me to you,” Sasha said. “Something that stands out to me, from Allen Faulkner’s eulogy, is not suspension related, but he said that Jason’s biggest regret was not getting to spend more time with Ivy. That’s just beautiful. I hope that’s a piece of Jason that people could understand, too.”