Katie Piper has recalled having a sandwich thrown at her by men after they saw her facial burns.
The Loose Women host and activist was left partially blind and with severe injuries after her ex-boyfriend, Daniel Lynch, arranged an acid attack on her in 2008. She was 24 at the time. Lynch was jailed for life with a minimum term of 16 years in May 2009.
Piper, 41, who has undergone 250 operations since the attack, recently published her book Still Beautiful, about cultivating confidence and the beauty of getting older.
She spoke about the book and her life during an appearance at the 2025 Hay Festival, which has partnered with The Independent for a second year.
Piper spoke about how people’s perceptions of her changed following the acid attack, while in conversation with barrister and television host Rob Rinder.
Speaking about aging as a woman, Piper told Rinder: “People age out of the male gaze, women age out of the male gaze. You stop getting the seat on the tube. They don’t open the door for you anymore.”
She continued: “I was ripped from the male gaze at 24 years old, when my friends were still online dating and going to nightclubs.
“I didn’t just become invisible, I became a target for people saying derogatory things to me in shops.”
Piper went on to recall a harrowing story in which a man threw a sandwich at her, after first cat-calling her from a van.
“I’m a very petite person; I had long blonde hair at the time and I was walking down the street with mum going to an outpatients appointment and a white van, I assume builders, were whistling at me complimentarily,” she said.
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“As they came around and saw my face, which is after the injury obviously, and I was wearing a plastic mask, someone threw a sandwich at me out of the window.”
Piper said that she could remember it was a BLT (bacon, lettuce, tomato) sandwich because the bacon got “stuck” in her hair.
“But it was that thing that from behind I was one thing to them and what that represents, and when they came around the front, I was unexpectedly something else,” she said.
“So it’s not natural for that to happen to you. It’s not a transition. It’s very violent and out of your control.”
Piper went on to speak about a “defining moment” that followed four years after the traumatic incident.
“For the first four years, when I saw myself in my dreams, she was always there: the girl that wasn’t burnt,” she said Piper. “In any dream – joyful dreams, chaotic dreams, boring dreams – she was there, pre that injury.
“Something happened four years later, I had a fairly mundane dream and she’d gone and it was my new reflection in that dream and I woke up and was like, ‘Oh.’”
Piper went on to compare the experience to losing a loved one, stating: “It’s painful for so long but you just live with it and you don’t realise it, and you never get over it but one day, you’re able to live with it.”
“And it must’ve just been my subconscious letting go,” she said, joking: “I never told anyone that so I decided to tell thousands of strangers in a shed!”
Last month, Piper opened up about how the injuries she sustained ultimately robbed her of the chance of having a third child.
In 2023, she was trying for a third child with husband Richard Sutton, but the couple had to abandon their plans when doctors told her she required an emergency operation on her blind left eye.
“I had quite a traumatic event with my eye. I had to have a general anaesthetic and you can’t be trying for a baby and also be having unexpected surgeries,” she explained. “We tried again, but it just didn’t happen.”
In January 2025, Piper announced that she made the decision to be fitted with the artificial eyeball. She shared a video of her appearing to begin her treatment with a medical tool inserted into her eye socket.
