“Having facial piercings won’t help, either.”
I worked at a multinational, big chemical company in a divisional research group. I was a technical manager for a specialty chemical group and had a very nice young lady working as a researcher on our team. She was intelligent, graduate degree, well-spoken, personable, well-respected among her peers and thorough in her job. I was talking to my boss one day (division director) about sending her to customers to present progress on specific projects, and he shook his head and said that upper management had already said they would never put her in front of customers...
She had multiple (5 - 7 per) ear piercings, nose ring, tongue stud, tattoos down both arms to her fingers, around her shoulders and up her neck to the base of her head...but she worked in a nerdy, geeky male-dominated environment where they couldn’t possibly understand that a customer might actually be interested in what she had to say rather than how she looked...Actually, she was a very pretty girl, not to say I found the tats and the piercings to be very attractive, just once you got to know her and work with her, you never really noticed them...
When I had one guy with piercings come in, I immediately thought how to make the interview as short as possible and just get it over with. Fortunately, he couldn’t even answer the few technical questions I asked him, so it was a moot point anyway.