Drag performer on finding empowerment after childhood cancer

“I’ve had some severe body dysmorphia… half my face looks different now, on one side I’ve got a flatter face, no eyebrow, my eye is sunken and my lip is like kind of more pushed one way,” they said.

“But with the make-up and the drag I can control how my face looks so I can eliminate these imperfections, if you want us to call them that, or I can lean into it and make more of a spectacle of it and make it kind of a badge of honour.”

Anniben, which means messy in Welsh, was a character Teifi began drawing when studying art at college.

“It was like a weird, clowny character with kind of sunken eyes, and then a big red nose,” they said.

“I thought ‘you look kind of ill and sickly’ and then it kind of clicked,” they said, adding it was “some sort of repressed trauma coming out”.

Then one day Teifi decided to use make-up to transform themselves into Anniben.

“I just realised that it was a really cool coping mechanism for me,” they said.

“It’s really helped me a lot.”