From Montreal squeegee kid to high-fashion runways, magazines and Lady Gaga video shoots, the last six months of Rick (Rico) Genest's life have been a whirlwind.
It's all thanks to Facebook and a lot of ink.
Rico and I hooked up on iChat, and the first image that popped up on my laptop screen was a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Kill Me." Only afterwards did his distinctive, skeleton-tattooed face make an appearance. When I asked him about his jarring look, he replied: "You know appearance doesn't mean anything. Most clean cut people are crooks behind closed doors. You can have really good-hearted people with crazy hairdos. You can't judge a book by its cover."
In Lady Gaga’s music video for “Born This Way,” Gaga and Rick “Rico” Genest dance pelvis to pelvis like a pair of horny zombies. They both look like skeletons, with exposed under-eye sockets and neck veins. The thing is, Gaga’s makeup was washed off after the shoot. Genest’s art is permanent.
He’s spent more than $16,000 getting the tattoos to look this way.
Most people don’t see a homeless 25-year-old whose entire body is tattooed to resemble a decaying corpse and think “fashion model!”
Getting tattooed to look like a cadaverous zombie was the best career decision Rick Genest ever made.
Seriously.
Yeah, there were some people who thought Genest was crazy 10 years ago when he made the fateful decision to tattoo his entire body to look like a cadaver.
To be fair, many of those same people probably haven't changed their minds about whether it was a wise decision for Genest to make his outsides look like his insides.
