Then there’s her frenulum piercing, seen in photos as a piece of jewlery that extends through through the underside of her upper lip. Speaking with NBC, Liu explained that she did the piercing herself. “I had my sister hold up my lip, and I was looking in the mirror, and I had my piercing needle,” she said of the procedure from around two years ago. The home job was motivated by cost, she said in a 2024 podcast interview. “Getting pierced at a shop is really expensive for no reason,” she said, “so I thought I’d learn it myself, be a little DIY-girl.”
Liu’s willingness to walk away from the sport and her devil-may-care attitude about her look has inspired social media excitement, such as an X post saying “alisa liu being the first woke idgafer alt baddie to win an olympic gold medalist.…THAT’S how you make america great again.”
Part of that attitude is Liu’s refusal to compromise. “These titles are huge, but I don’t want them to overshadow who I am and what I do and what I am all about,” Liu said after winning her gold medal. “Winning isn’t all that, and neither is losing.”
“Through retirement, I realized I am a little bit like a creative person, and I have these ideas. I have my own sense of fashion and I’m a little bit stubborn with it. I love choreography and music, and I do it on my own terms. No one tells me what to do.”
Originally published in Vanity Fair Italy
