Help Lauren Pine

We've written before encouraging our clients and blog followers to support causes we believe in, from preserving the archives of "Sailor Sid" Diller to publishing a new monograph on Stelarc. This time, it's a plea to help Lauren Pine, one of our own, with mounting medical expenses after she was extensively injured after being run over by a dump truck.

The GoFundMe page describes Lauren as "an advocate for social good, a badass,  a dear friend, a healer, and an all-around amazing human." It states that, "As a nurse, she has contributed to her community in countless ways, gently guiding her patients toward better health and improved quality of life." What isn't mentioned is that she was also an early body modification pioneer and former employee of Gauntlet.

Lauren was described by Fakir as "one of the first new small-waist devotees." A chance meeting between them at a crowded street fair in San Francisco led to Lauren being the subject of a several-page pictorial in the inaugural issue of Fakir's Body Play magazine. Fakir describes their meeting, and the accompanying pictures show Lauren corseted down to a 17" waist, which was quite an accomplishment—and an anomaly back then, still several years before mid-nineties fetish culture made corseting almost commonplace at Goth clubs and fetish events.

Lauren went on to work the sales counter at the the Gauntlet in West Hollywood, and eventually became a piercer working at the New York City location. In addition to Body Play, Lauren was also featured in issue #41 of PFIQ , in 1993. (For anyone not familiar with Gauntlet and PFIQ, and the impact of both on the body piercing industry, a good primer is Jim Ward's interviews for BME. For the whole story, Jim's book is definitely worth the purchase price.)

Lauren had been working in New York City as a nurse when, in November of 2017, she was walking her bicycle across a crosswalk and was hit and run over by a truck. She had extensive injuries that resulted in the amputation of her left leg at the hip, and spent two months in a burn unit ICU enduring skin grafts from degloving injuries sustained to her right leg.

Despite having excellent insurance through her job as a nurse, she has
still not been able to meet all the medical expenses associated with the accident, nor was restitution from the trucking company even marginally sufficient to cover her costs. To help, two of her friends have started a Go Fund Me page to raise money to offset her expenses. At Infinite Body Piercing, we're encouraging everyone in the industry to help take care of one of our own, donate to her recovery, and help Lauren Pine.