"A lot of people can't look at me," he admits. "They say,'Oh my God, don't look at me.'"
It isn't that they're afraid the mild-mannered guitarist will do something unspeakable to them. It's just hard to stare someone in the face when all they've got for eyes are two huge, black pupils. Even Borland's bandmates - singer Fred Durst, bassist Sam Rivers, drummer John Otto and turntablist DJ Lethal - were freaked out at first. "Fred kept cracking up," Borland says. "He kept going,'Aaaahh!! No, nooo!' It was all the other guys could talk about for a while.
"But everybody in the band can look at me now. They can actually look me in the face and talk when we're about to go onstage."
At the moment, there's nothing at all untoward about Borland's appearance. His eyes, for the record, are everyday brown. "Very normal," he says, smiling. "Not big black." Indeed, as he munches on chicken pot pie in a cafe in Jacksonville, Florida - Limp Bizkit's hometown - there's nothing about Borland that would attract a second glance. With his black clothes, pale skin and facial jewelry (eybrow and lip rings), he looks more like an art student than a rock star.
Borland, as a matter of fact, is a painter and sculptor, and it was his visual arts background (combined with a healthy interest in science fiction) that led to those big black eyes in the first place. "I didn't make them," he says. "They wrere done by the people who make the contact lenses for [the sci-fi television series] Babylon Five.
It's just a lot more fun to dress up and look completely bizarre onstage," he says. "Keep it different. It's grown to be different characters, now. Like, I have a bunny suit, and a skeleton suit, and this big, over-sized kung fu suit that I wear onstage." One of Borland's favorite characters is something he call the Burnt Match. "I go onstage wearing almost nothing. I have underwear and my boots on, and I paint my whole hear black-from the neck up-and I have the black contacts. All you can see is these glowing teeth."

~J.D.Considine, Guitar World Magazine