Square Personalities: Chameleon's Owen

The first thing I learned about Owen Beane, as I sat in Chameleon Tattoo and Body Piercing waiting for him to arrive, is that he is a consumate professional. He doesn’t break out of that professionalism, I’m told, even when his colleague shows him hand-drawn penises while with clients.

“Step into my office,” Beane invites with air-quotes around “office,” before explaining that the cushy chairs just outside the glass doors of Chameleon do not in fact constitute an office. This was the first of many phrases he would qualify with air-quotes.

Long hair, full beard, a hoop in his septum, a flower stud below his lip. Upwards of six feet tall and quite thin, he wears a black t-shirt revealing two arms sleeved in dark blue/black ink tattoos, with open circles exposing each elbow. On the knuckle of his right pinky is the letter “O,” and the rest of his name is spelled out across the next three fingers: O-W-E-N. He holds a Fruit and Nut Delight Kind bar. He asks my permission to grab a coffee before the interview, and returns with a venti iced from the Starbucks downstairs—no, it’s not black.

When he graduated high school in 1996 (he was born in ’78, making him 35 now), “dyeing your hair crazy was the thing...grunge was the thing,” Beane explains. “Looking the way I wanted was more important to me.” CVS had about as little interest in hiring him as he had in being hired by CVS. “People would just be like, ‘nah.’”

Beane let it slide, even though he couldn’t afford being discerning. “I didn’t have a fallback plan,” he admits. “But I needed to look the way I wanted to look. And I was planning on being a rockstar too, so I was like, I don’t have to worry about that.”

Out of high school in Manchester, MA and from a musical family, Beane enrolled in a year-long sound engineering program that didn’t require SAT scores, “which was important for me,” he added, chuckling, “because I didn’t take ’em.” While in school with some student loans, he hung around Chameleon, where his music buddy, Greg, had landed a piercing job. Noticing that Beane was strapped for cash, Greg made a proposition: five bucks a day to take trash out and clean tools, if they even had customers.

“And it wasn’t like, ‘sweet, I’m an apprentice,’” Beane said. “I was just like, ‘yeah, whatever, that’s cool. I’m gonna be here anyways, so I might as well.’” He recalls that it seemed like an insignificant choice at the time.

After about a year, Greg asked him if he wanted to be an actual apprentice.

While a part of him had hoped to work as close to music as possible, Beane came to understand how little control the people he interned for had over the music they worked with and how much they struggled on a daily basis to make ends meet. They’d begin work at 2 p.m., and never quite knew when they’d finish for the night, sometimes 2 a.m., sometimes noon the next day.

As he explains it, he agreed to learn the piercing trade because he loved music “too much to risk ruining it” for himself.

The nature of the piercing business has evolved immensely over Beane’s 18 years inside it. When he began working in the ’90s, piercings were generally a gay subcultural phenomenon, and many days at Chameleon saw no customers. The turn of the millennium saw two additions to pop culture: Baywatch (in which Pamela Anderson displays a navel piercing) and Aerosmith’s music video for Cryin’ (in which Alicia Silverstone gets her navel pierced). Suddenly, piercing had entered the mainstream, and people got off Beane’s back about when he would put in another application at CVS.

One day about seven years ago—which Beane cites as piercing’s peak—he set a personal record of 61 piercings in a day. “Not a happy day,” he sighs. People waited three hours between signing up and being pierced, forcing Beane to apologize to the pissed-off before even beginning the usual process of gaining trust. Each had fewer than five minutes, and no chance to reconsider placement or jewelry choices.

Beane takes pride in Chameleon’s shift to prioritizing quality over quantity. Now that he’s manager, he demands at least 15 minutes per piercing. On nine- to 10-hour weekdays the store usually serves 10-15 clients, while Fridays and Saturdays can mean as many as 25 or 30. While he still actively works to gain each client’s trust, many people he pierces have been referred to him specifically, so that part of his job is already half-done.

As the piercer’s world has changed, so has the world of the piercees. Students have become an essential client base. Harvard students specifically, however, didn’t jump in until about six years into the boom. He says you could tell when we began to show up. Our representatives seemed more intellectual than the typical customer and almost never talked of parties or any “social stuff.” They exuded an air of superiority, which Beane is quick to defend as probably earned, because “you’re not gettin in there unless you got brains.”

Over the past five years or so though, Beane has seen a change in the Harvard students eager for his services. They seem more open to the bohemian style, focused on fashion, and chatty about last night’s party or someone’s trip to the hospital. They now express interest in visible piercings beyond the safe nostril and ear choices.

While he sees the lines increasingly blurred between customers from different schools, Beane does have something to say about how most Harvard (and perhaps MIT) students differ from our counterparts from other schools in the Boston area.

“It’s totally not fly by the sea body modification,” he explains. “It’s way more, like, deliberate, approaching it from a really analytical mind.”

Beane admits that he is making generalizations. However, as a Harvard student having recently pierced my tragus at Chameleon—a move that 1) the boy from high school I was about to end a relationship with did not support and 2) would mark the first thing I did without asking my mother— accompanied by my straight-laced varsity athlete pre-med freshman roommate for her last-day-of-classes-release/rebellion of a cartilage piercing, I would say his understanding is pretty astute.

“I take an interest in the people that I work on,” he says. “I try to bridge the gap a little bit and be like, what’s your world like? And let me teach you about my world.”

By the end of the hour that Beane has spent talking to me, he commands the cushy chairs just outside the glass doors of Chameleon with an openness and ease that could’ve convinced me we had been sitting in his office all along.

“‘Fake it til you make it’ kind of diminishes what I’ve done,” Beane says, before slowly conceding, “but it… kinda… sums it up.”