THE ‘90S NOSE JOB : These Days, Everyone Seems to Be Getting a Tattoo or Having a Body Part Pierced

Tumor is pretty hip for a 15-year-old girl, always on the guest list, always knows who’s coming through town, usually manages to get albums a few weeks before they show up in the stores. She knows how to stage-dive without sticking her Doc Martens into some goober’s face. Her favorite color is black. At a party this summer, she spotted the lead guy from Skinny Puppy through his mufti disguise and chatted with him as easily as if she had been his kid sister; another tortured, skinny industrial-rock singer met her and fell instantly, irrevocably in unrequited love. (His band wasn’t cool enough.) Tumor thinks that her well-honed sensibilities are pretty much wasted in the Midwestern suburb where she lives with her parents, which is probably true. She lives for her semiannual visits to her big sister, Julie, in L.A.

Julie paints in oils, is married to a gifted rock drummer and has worked as an art director for magazines it is certain Marilyn Quayle does not subscribe to. She collects old off-brand guitars and plays them screechingly in punk bands. She is no stranger to guest lists herself--Julie’s even hipper than Tumor. What’s more, she knows Important People. Still, Julie is 35 and has been through life stages that her sister has not. For example, she has never had the slightest urge to get tattooed or pierced.

Tumor, on the other hand, sometimes thinks of nothing else. And this summer, she was determined to go back home with a souvenir. After all, everybody at the Melrose boutique where she worked part-time had at least a nose ring or two, as did most of her friends in bands and three out of the four checkout girls at the health-food store where she bought her soy milk last week. Life is different with a nose ring--it’s like going around with your arm in a cast and everybody talks to you, even at snobby stores like Retail Slut. Or maybe especially at snobby stores like Retail Slut.

Ten years ago, tattoos and body piercings might have implied some kind of antisocial streak or at least a weird sex vibe. Tattoos are pretty much no big deal these days unless you get one of those jet-black, tribal full-body jobs. You probably have a cousin or a hairdresser with one of those spiky barbed-wire things tattooed around her arm. You’ve probably even run into people with pierced tongues, which glint a little when they open their mouths and cause them to talk with slight lisps, as if they’d once lived somewhere exotic and hard to pronounce. It’s a passive rebellion thing, for a very passive era.

What Tumor really wanted was a slender ring in her bellybutton, which looks really cool when you wear, like, a black bra top under your sister’s leather jacket, but Julie put her foot down. If Tumor showed up back home with a pierced bellybutton, even if it didn’t get infected (which it usually does), Mom would never let Julie hear the end of it. Tumor was going back to Mom’s house without a piercing in her bellybutton, or her eyebrow, or her nose.

Julie did promise Tumor that she would take her to get a couple of modest piercings: one at the very top of the ear and one through the tragus, which is that little triangular flap of cartilage right above the earlobe. Even schoolteachers have multiple pierced ears now: no problem. So Julie booked an appointment at the Gauntlet, a full-service West Hollywood establishment that is more or less the Van Cleef & Arpels of the highly ventilated crowd. But when the two drove down to the store, the woman behind the counter refused to work on Tumor. Tumor was too young and still growing; in three or four years, her auxiliary earrings would shift to some inconvenient place. The piercing technician smiled sadly and said: “Next.”

Julie stood there, and she stared into space, and she suddenly recalled a really great-looking black woman she had seen at the supermarket a couple of years ago, dressed very conservatively but with a small, elegant glint on her nose. As she remembered the woman, she realized . . . that woman wasn’t trendy. She liked that. And so Julie got her nose pierced: an itty, tiny stud right in the back part of her nose, gleaming silver in the late-afternoon sun.