Shaun Ryder explains why he had his eyebrows tattooed on
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Shaun Ryder may not be your usual customer for eyebrow tattoos, which are beloved of many a reality TV star, but the singer has turned to the beauty technique after losing all his hair.
Speaking on White Wine Question Time, the lead singer for The Happy Mondays said his alopecia was the result of having to stop taking medicine for his under-active thyroid.
“We had to stop the testosterone replacement for a while because we blood cells were turning some other colour — these blood cells were going dolly,” he told host Kate Thornton.
“They stopped my testosterone replacement and then literally within a week or my hair had obviously gone.”
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The singer/songwriter has spoken up before about his condition, which is hereditary.
“I’ve got hereditary thyroid problems and once that goes, it controls everything,” he told The Guardian this year.
The star, who also caught COVID last year, said he decided to fake his eyebrows and hair with the tattoo.
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“I just popped over to London the other day to get my eyebrows done,” he said after Thornton commented on the fact his hair was growing back.
He continued: “It's called skin pigmentation. It's a procedure that you get done that is similar to a tattoo – I’ve had it done on my head and on my eyebrows.”
Listen: Shaun Ryder talks about what made him finally quit drugs
Brow pigmentation uses a regular tattoo needle to create the illusion of hair, whether that's an eyebrow or hair on top of the head.
It’s not the first time Ryder has gone for a cosmetic procedure.
—Years of drug abuse and avoiding the dentist for 20 years — meant the 56-year-old lost his teeth and had to go through cosmetic dentistry costing tens of thousands of pounds to fix them. Since then, he’s had them all replaced.
“I had veneers years ago and when the veneers went c**p, these were all screwed in,” he told Thornton. “I actually had these done in an 18-hour session.”
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Ryder, who has been clean since 2007, says he realised when he hit his forties that it was time to grow up for the sake of his health.
“I was still doing the same thing and being the same way at 40 as I was at 17,” he admitted. “It was like 40, was growing up time.”
Hear Shaun Ryder talk about why he turned to drugs in the first place in the latest episode of White Wine Question Time. Listen now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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