Sylvain Hélaine has tattoos on almost every inch of his body, even the whites of his eyes. When a makeup artist covered them all up, people couldn’t believe it was the same man.
Sylvain Hélaine is known as the world’s most tattooed teacher. So when he had every bit of his ink covered up with makeup, the result was hard to believe. The Frenchman has taught in classrooms in both the UK and France for almost 20 years. Almost every inch of his body is tattooed, from his face and neck to the whites of his eyes.
In an interview on This Morning with hosts Dermot O’Leary and Sian Welby, he talked about how it all started.
It began in Brixton
Hélaine was 27 when he moved out of his mom’s house and came to the UK. On his very first day, he didn’t even know where he was going to sleep. Then, in a McDonald’s in Brixton, he spotted a man with a full sleeve tattoo and his whole neck covered in ink.
“It was like an eye-opener for me,” he said. “I fell in love with the tattoos, and I started my journey.”
He didn’t hold back. Within his first year, he’d had both arms done, even though the pain was a shock.
“I passed out after two minutes,” he admitted. “I didn’t expect the pain.”
He says going all in is just who he is. As a 20-year-old, he was a martial arts teacher who trained every day and competed at a high level. He even passed his car and motorbike licenses in about a month.
“I always invest myself 100%,” he said.
A face nobody recognized
In a 2020 video for Truly, Hélaine got a dramatic makeover to surprise his family. A makeup artist carefully painted skin-colored products over his tattoos until the designs disappeared.
The man underneath looked almost nothing like the Hélaine people know.
Not everyone was a fan of the result. Some viewers thought the makeup looked too flat and unnatural. “That makeup artist did him so dirty. Looks like she took a paint roller to Him. Didn’t add any blush to make the cheeks look naturally flushed or any depth to the eyes. Looked so unnatural.,” one person wrote.
“I’m surprised but happy that he can be a school teacher while being so heavily tattooed (especially neck/face/eyes). That just wouldn’t happen in US public schools,” another wrote.
Strictly business in class
Hélaine says children and adults react to him very differently. “It always takes two minutes for children to accept me, two hours for the parents, and two days for grandparents,” he said.
Surprisingly, his tattoos aren’t something he talks about at work.
“We just work, we take out our exercise book, write out the date, and it goes like that. I’m really serious,” he explained. Any questions, he said, can wait for the playground.
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