New style for a new era
There is a version of me in the new Elevation music video that I recognize but am not anymore, the dark hair and the look most of you have known since the beginning, and I watched it drop knowing I had already changed everything weeks earlier and told nobody, because the video was shot with my old look and it deserved its moment before I put a new style in front of it. So I kept my mouth shut and waited, and in that waiting I understood exactly why I had done it: I had been that version of me for long enough, and I had been ready to stop for longer than I was willing to admit.
Here is what I changed, and what it means.
The Silver Hair
I had dark hair for most of my life, brown and long and completely unremarkable, the kind of hair that does not make a statement, the kind that blend in too easily, and I liked that once… Before I stopped liking it and kept it anyway, the way you keep furniture you stopped noticing years ago. Going silver was not a dramatic decision so much as a late one, the undercut came with it, and I kept the length because it frames things without hiding them.
The Piercings
I wanted something I could not take back, and gauges were the answer because stretched lobes keep their shape and do not reverse the way almost every other piercing does the moment you remove it. The nose piercing I got in the past few weeks represents something specific that I’m not going to name here, because it’s mine, and knowing what it marks is enough.
The Fox
My family name is Renard, which means fox in French, and I have had that name my whole life, so when I thought about what belonged on my right sleeve there was never really a question.
The Butterfly
The butterfly is for Elevation and for The Butterfly Effect movie. Elevation is the song that came right before all of this and lives right next to it in a way I cannot explain cleanly, and The Butterfly Effect is a film I have watched more times than makes sense because the premise is the one I keep returning to: that where you are now is not arbitrary, that there were tiny irreversible moments that made this exact version of you, and you were not watching when they happened. The butterfly also symbolizes the ephemeral aspect of life for me, a reminder that you must live every moment as if it could be your last.
Bloodborne
Bloodborne is my favorite video game and it was always going to end up on my skin. The Hunter's Mark at the top of my right arm, a stylized Hunter at the bottom of the same arm, another stylized Hunter on my stomach. The insight mechanic in that game, knowledge that accumulates and reveal the world’s horrors to you as it grows, is the most honest description of certain kinds of learning I have found in any medium. I have spent more hours in Yharnam than I can count, and I know what the cost of knowledge feels like.
The Pentagrams
The pentagrams are at the bottom of my belly and on my back, placed to mirror each other, and that placement is deliberate in a way the meaning cannot be separated from: the same mark on both sides of the same body, the front you show the world and the back you carry facing away from it, because what I refuse to apologize for does not change depending on which direction you are looking at me from. I did not get them to shock anyone. I got them because they were already true before the ink.
The Moon
The moon is threaded through my body work the same way her cycles have always been threaded through everything I do, and I mean that in the most literal sense: things come back, things disappear and are not gone, things pull on you in the dark of the night. I find that honest! The idea that the moon can be completely absent and completely present at the same time, embodying life's transitions and femininity, is more accurate to how things actually work than almost anything else I have found said about it.
The Skeleton
Bones are what stays. Everything else I have been, every version I have tried on or been asked to wear, the soft parts come and go, and the frame is always the same frame, and it does not lie. The skeleton imagery is not about death so much as it is about that: what is left when you stop performing, what is actually there when everything else is done pretending, the part of you that was honest before you learned not to be.
The Back
The back piece covers my full spine and I cannot see it without a mirror, which is the right placement for what it is: the same woman three times across the top, three versions of the same face because I have never been just one thing at once and I stopped pretending otherwise a long time ago, and beneath them a skull with roses on each side, because the roses are not decoration, they are the point, everything beautiful and everything ephemeral sitting right next to the thing that ends it, which is the most honest way I know to describe what life actually looks like. At the bottom the pentagram sits between two crescent moons, anchoring the piece and mirroring the one on my chest, to symbolize the various transitions I’ve known in my life.
The Broken Heart
The Pink Paradox broken heart logo is on my right wrist and on both legs, because it’s a broken heart that is still smiling and that is our Pink Paradox band in one image: everything has cracked you open and you are still here, still finding something to smile about, and I needed that anywhere on my body, to ensure I could not miss it.
I am still the person in the Elevation video and I am also not her anymore, and both of those things are true at the same time: a true paradox.
But this change is not just mine! It’s also the first visible step into the new Pink Paradox era. As we prepare for the third album, I am no longer interested in softening edges or performing versions of myself that feel safe. The music coming ahead is more honest and frontal than anything we’ve made before. It demands presence without apology, truth without filters, and a body that finally matches the riffs that are coming out of my guitar.
This evolution is not cosmetic, it’s necessary. The old skin could not carry what is about to be said. This is what I look like now… It took me long enough.
