I looked like I had been beaten up
CLAIRE Hawkins’s lips swelled terribly and went black after treatments by beauticians.
The 24-year-old’s face looked so bad, her mother thought she had been beaten up.
She had corrective treatment by a cosmetic doctor. The whole process cost £1,500.
Miss Hawkins, an administrator from Yeovil, Somerset, decided she wanted fillers when she was 21 after feeling insecure about the way she looked.
In the months that followed, she had doses injected by beauticians in her hometown.
During one appointment at a friend’s house in May 2015, she was injected with 1ml of filler. Her lips swelled, but they eventually appeared to settle down.
Miss Hawkins then arranged another appointment two months later at a beautician’s home in north London. She was injected with 1.5ml of filler, costing £360.
But shockingly, Miss Hawkins’s mouth quickly began to swell. ‘I could taste blood,’ she said.
In the hours that followed, she began to suffer what appeared to be symptoms associated with necrosis. She also developed peasized lumps in her mouth.
Miss Hawkins said she was ‘horrified,’ adding: ‘I looked like a creature from The Grinch.’
The bruising went down but in the year that followed, she noticed her lips had become uneven and lumpy. So she visited cosmetic doctor Beatriz Molina, who told her the filler had been injected in the wrong place.
Dr Molina told the Mail: ‘ She was devastated... We had to dissolve all the product out. It was creating a deformity of the lip, which looked very unattractive.’