I used hair dye – and my face inf lated to twice the size
A STUDENT who attempted to dye her own hair ended up with this extreme makeover when she suffered an allergic reaction.
The 19-year-old said she ‘almost died’ after using a DIY kit from a supermarket.
Her shocking disfigurement – shared on social media – was caused by the chemical PPD, found in 90 per cent of hair dyes.
At first it caused her scalp to itch and the top of her head to swell. The English student from Paris, named only as Estelle, then used antihistamines and cream to try to control the reaction but by the following day her head had ballooned in size.
‘I could still see,’ she told the newspaper Le Parisien, but added: ‘I was struggling to breathe. My forehead had doubled in volume. My head was like a lightbulb.’
Her tongue also started to swell and she was taken to hospital.
She had used an allergy test that came with the product, having previously suffered a reaction to a different hair dye – but she only waited 30 minutes for the results, instead of the recommended 48 hours.
Her mother, Sygrid, said more should be done to highlight the dangers of PPD, or paraphenylenediamine. ‘It’s true that she didn’t follow the instructions word for word, but the warning has to be clearer,’ she said. Two weeks after her ordeal, Estelle is almost back to normal but went public with her ordeal to warn others.
‘I almost died,’ she said. ‘I don’t want something similar to happen to other people.’
The chemical, also present in black henna tattoos, is the culprit in many adverse reactions to hair dye. Products are not allowed to contain more than a 2 per cent concentration of PPD.
In 2012, Julia McCabe, 38, from Keighley, West Yorkshire died a year after an allergic reaction to L’Oreal hair dye left her in a coma. She had previously reacted badly to a henna tattoo on her scalp.