‘I thought I was blind’: Ace Frehley discusses legendary mishaps with his Kiss makeup

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Legend — or at least Wikipedia — tells us that Ace Frehley’s attempt to turn his hair silver for the cover of Kiss’ debut album had disastrous results. The story is that Frehley had an allergic reaction, when the guitarist couldn’t remove the commercial spray paint he used.

Not true, Frehley tells Loudwire. “It was just silver spray that washed out.”

Of course, Frehley didn’t exactly get out of that period unscathed: “I think whoever wrote that is confused with what happened to me in Paris,” he says. “I was in Paris, and I bumped into a model — a fashion model that I knew from New York. She was doing a photo shoot there. We ended up getting drunk on about four bottles of champagne, and I ended up passing out in the bed with my makeup on after the show. When I woke up, I had an allergic reaction from not taking the silver off — because it’s ground up metal. My eyes were swollen shut. I was blind.”

A quick call to his manager for medical help straightened everything out. But Frehley says he had larger concerns, at least initially.

“They rushed a doctor over, and they shot me up with, like, Prednisone — an anti-inflammatory that took it down,” Frehley says. “But for a minute there, I thought I was blind. I didn’t know what had happened. It was insane.”

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