WTF was she thinking?
She wanted to pump her lips and fade a scar and couldn't afford a plastic surgeon, so she bought silicone online for $10 a bottle and injected it in her face.
"It's very embarrassing that somebody would actually do this," Mary (not her real name) told ABC News. "Insane, I can't believe I did what I did."
Mary thought she was being smart. "I actually felt pretty proud of myself. I thought this is a cheap way to go, it looks good," she said. "This one Web site had it for $10 for a bottle."
But her pride vanished the next day.
"By the following day it was just completely inflamed my whole face and the area that you can see in the cheek was very raised and very infected," she said. "It expands, it's like rubber and your own collagen is forming scar tissue around it…it just looked like horrible blisters."
A Midwestern mother injected her lips and face with silicone she purchased over the Internet. (Dr. Steven Williams/ABC)
I'm just amazed that anyone would think that a $10 bottle of silicone purchased on the Internet would provide the same results of a $1,000 silicon injection administered by a plastic surgeon. If it were that simple, doctors would be out of business. It's common sense--isn't it?
A while back, Mary paid $1,000 to a plastic surgeon to have silicone injected into her face to help fade a scar from an accident, but what he used what medical-grade silicone, and what Mary purchased wasn't medical grade and was labeled as a personal lubricant, ABC News reported.
"At the time I thought it would be okay," she said. "I thought most of it would come out of the face and the lips and very little of it would actually stay in there. I never dreamt this would happen."
She had no choice because she couldn't afford it.
"It's only a select few people who can afford to have this done," she said, citing the expense of treatments such as Botox and wrinkle fillers like Restylane and Juvederm. "That's hundreds of dollars every time you have it done and it's not permanent. Who can afford that?"
Well...(a) some people can and do afford it, (b) botox and silicone treatments aren't medically necessary (try not being able to afford medication or treatments you actually need to function healthwise), (c) if you can't afford it, don't get it, and (d) if you find yourself willing to risk your health to fade a small scar, run to a therapist.
Unfortunately, instead of saving thousands, Mary has ended up with massive medical bills and had to turn to a California plastic surgeon when no doctor in her area could help remove the infected silicone, ABC reported. The price of vanity tends to be too high.
"It's nothing you can just draw out. It's something you have to actually go in and surgically cut out," Dr. Steven Williams explained. "The body looks at this as almost like an invasion and tries to break down the material and that's accompanied by inflammation and scar tissue."
"Once someone goes down that path they're never really going to be back to normal," he added.
Remember the Korean plastic surgery addict who injected cooking oil in her face?
Hang Mioku (left) wasn't satisfied with her beauty, so last year, when she couldn't afford silicone treatments anymore or find a doctor to treat her after decades of procedures, she decided to do it herself.
She injected 1 lb of cooking oil into her face--cooking oil, my friends--and the result was grotesque (second photo, right).
Doctors ultimately removed a half pound of oil from her face and neck, but she'll never be able to regain her original appearance (see third photo below, which shows the end result).
She, like others addicted to plastic surgery, reportedly suffers from a mental illness called Body Dysmorphic Disorder that makes people fixate on small or imagined flaws in their appearance.
Michael Jackson was said to suffer from this condition, which led to countless surgeries on his face, leaving him almost nose-less.
A patient cited by a U.K. study, for example, used sandpaper as a form of derm-abrasion to remove scars and lighten his skin.
"We've had several patients try to remove implants from themselves, try to take off skin lesions themselves all with relatively disastrous consequences," said Williams.
"They don't know what they're injecting, they don't know the correct techniques, they can have problems ranging from infection injecting into the wrong area damaging vascular structure, damaging neurologic structures."
Mary now says buyer beware: the mere $10 she paid for the price of beauty ended up costing her everything, ABC reported.
"The way we look, it's huge," she said. "I am frightened everyday this is not going away and knowing I did it to myself, I should have been happy with the way I looked."
Too little, too late...and that sucks.
"I have to leave it in God's hands and realize there are more important things in life than how we all look," she told ABC. "I think people get carried away with perfection. I have to live the rest of my life with this."
Sources: ABC News
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