The shocking truth behind the filler fad
Reality stars spark a huge rise in the demand for cosmetic facial injections Dr Christian and surgery safety group, Save Face, warn of the lack of regulation with the procedure Many untrained practitioners leave young women with damaging complications and
lastic surgery P may be nothing new in the world of celebrity, but there now appears to be a shocking rise in the number of young stars dramatically transforming their looks with facial fillers.
Geordie Shore star Chloe Ferry was just 19 when she first joined the reality show in 2014 and started plumping her face with fillers just one year later – to the horror of many fans.
Opening up to Closer recently, the 23 year old – who has since had filler in her lips, cheeks and chin, as well as a nose job and boob op – admitted she was suffering from body dysmorphia, revealing, “People say I look good and I don’t think that I do. I look in the mirror and think I look f***ing minging.”
FREE TREATMENT
But when asked about rumours she’d splashed a huge £50k on surgery, Chloe worryingly said, “People offer me free filler all the time and I’m not going to turn free lip fillers down.”
Chloe’s co-star Sophie Kasaei also recently told us, “People say we’re crazy for getting surgery, but we get offered so much free treatment all the time. I may look like I haven’t changed as much as the other girls, but I’ve had more filler than all of them put together.”
But the filler craze isn’t confined to the world of celebrity. Closer’s Dr Christian Jessen says there’s been a huge rise in the number of young girls seeking out the procedure to emulate their favourite reality stars.
Yet despite the high demand for this treatment, there’s no regulation in the UK governing who can inject fillers. Dr Christian says, “There’s a real grey area in the UK with this procedure. Filler is usually made up of hyaluronic acid which, unlike anti-wrinkle injections such as Botox, doesn’t require a prescription. Essentially, a person can order filler online and start injecting into their own or another person’s face with no licence or training. Young girls who want to emulate their
favourite reality stars are often swayed by the cheap prices charged by these untrained people. But it’s unregulated and that’s where the danger lies.”
Ashton Collins, from Save Face – an organisation that has developed a register of safe practitioners in the UK – tells Closer, “Non-surgical cosmetic treatments generate over £2.75 billion in the UK, yet the sector is almost entirely unregulated.
“Legally, non-surgical treatments such as fillers can be provided by anyone and practitioners aren’t required to have any qualifications – medical or otherwise. In the past 12 months, we’ve received an alarming increase in the number of reports regarding procedures gone wrong and rogue practitioners. The most common complaints are unsightly lumps, painful swelling and infection.
“Figures have almost trebled in comparison to the previous year, with a total of 934. Over 83 per cent of the reports we’ve received were of treatments administered by non-healthcare professionals like beauticians and hairdressers. A huge 30 per cent of complaints we received were related to procedures being performed by people who had set themselves up with no relevant training and were believed to be purchasing products, such as dermal fillers – sometimes made of saline or even silicone – on the internet.
“There’s no law preventing this, either. These people are often not trained on how to deal with someone having a bad or allergic reaction to the filler, or if they go into anaphylactic shock. And we’ve found if people do suffer adverse reactions and need medical attention, these businesses often shut down and disappear – leaving the girls with no aftercare.
INEXPERIENCED
“Surgeons should be bound by a code of ethics and ensure their patient is making an informed decision about the procedure and is not suffering from body dysmorphia. But these inexperienced practitioners appear to be administering filler to their clients as often as they like. As long as they are getting paid, they don’t seem to care.”
Opening up about the dark side of fillers, Geordie Shore star Abbie Holborn, 21, revealed to Closer she felt she’d wrecked her natural looks after developing an unhealthy addiction to the procedure at just 19.
She says, “I think I looked better before. I was just getting fillers done because everyone around me was. The new thing was to get filler in your cheeks, or your jaw, your lips – anywhere really. I was just doing it because I felt I had to keep up. But I looked puffy. I looked big. I don’t know what I wanted to achieve, I just wanted to keep up with everyone else.”
And former Made In Chelsea star Daisy Robins says she “ruined” her natural beauty with lip fillers, admitting, “I began having filler in my lips every six months aged 21 and would go to a different person each time as they offered it for free – I don’t know whether they were even qualified. It wasn’t until I had comments saying I looked like I had a cleft-lip in my photos that I realised I’d gone too far and had ruined my lips.”