A woman has warned others about cosmetic procedures after a botched job left her looking like a 'Halloween character'.
Milly Powell, 27, is raising awareness about unsafe aesthetic clinics. She said she wants people to do their own research before undergoing cosmetic procedures.
Milly, who works in marketing, intended to get the procedure done to fill a dimple on the left side of her face. However, she says she was left ''unrecognisable'' instead after getting a thread lift at a clinic in Britain.
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Milly initially went to her local clinic for a filler treatment but claims she was pressured into getting a PDO thread lift by three members of staff. The procedure lasted 15 minutes and cost £850 but that quarter of an hour has resulted in a year-long battle trying to rectify the damage.
One year after the procedure, Milly took to social media and went viral after imploring other women to do their research before getting a thread lift. Milly's procedure consisted of making two incisions a few centimetres above her hairline before a fish hook-like instrument is inserted to pull the face up using a thread then a knot is tied to keep it in place.
PDO stands for Polydioxanone and refers to the material used to make the threads used in the lifting procedure She also had filler injected into her jaw, lips and cheeks.
After the procedure, Milly was left looking like "a Halloween character" and eventually lost feeling in her nose after five days. She also suffered from swelling, headaches and a tight feeling in her face.
Milly, who is from Cheshire, said: "I went to get my dimple filled, so essentially what they do is they inject filler into your face and it fills out the dimple. When I got there they said to me 'oh no, we've got a different procedure, it's way more natural than filler and what we do is we put threads in your face and pull back the skin and the dimple will be gone'.
"I was like, these [people] are professionals so I'm going to listen and I was lying on the bed and they make two incisions in your scalp about two centimetres above your hairline. They then insert a really thin metal rod and attached to that rod is a thread that acts like barbed wire with bits on it that get stuck in your tissue and they pull it back really tight and tie it. They completely numb your face first so I could only feel tugging and stuff."
The person carrying out the procedure told Milly that she would "balance out" her profile. She said: "She was injecting and injecting and injecting and the whole time she was injecting me she was on the phone. She was really distracted and was not paying the slightest bit of attention."
It took around a quarter of an hour but Milly estimated that it should take closer to an hour and a half. She said: "She asked if I wanted to have a look, it was just before Halloween, and I had a look and I looked like a Halloween character. She said 'you look really white, do you feel ok?'
"I was shocked and asked if this was normal to which she replied 'this is completely normal', everybody in there were saying that it was completely normal and symptoms would subside in two days."
Milly then left the clinic "absolutely horrified" at what had just happened to her. She said: "I started to realise something was wrong because I started to lose the feeling in the tip of my nose and my nose started to go really shiny."
The pain came an hour after the treatment and got worse with "splitting headaches". Since the ordeal, Milly had to see another surgeon to resolve the issues and re-enhance her face after it was left sunken on one side.
She has spent £1,200 to get the fillers dissolved and spent £65 per radio frequency treatment, which is used in an attempt to break down the filler, on top of earnings being lost due to taking days off work. Milly attempted to call the clinic where she had the procedure but no one answered.
She decided to contact them on Instagram the same day and the day after. The clinic responded and reiterated that the side effects were normal.
When trying to respond to them further she claims that she discovered the Instagram page to be removed. Milly then did some research of her own on the clinic, something she said she should have done earlier, to find out that they had 220 one-star reviews of people who were left in the same situation.
Milly decided to go to a different clinic five days after her car-crash procedure and was told upon arrival work had to be done right away. She said: "I went to a [new] clinic and they said 'we need to get this out of your face right now', so all the filler that was in my jaw was in lumps but it's supposed to go in a line down your jaw but it was just in big balls."
The clinic administered injections of dissolved into her face which alleviated the pain and discomfort "right away". Milly wanted to get the treatment in the first place because of the insecurity she felt around the dimple on the left side of her face, which is still there after a year since having the treatment.
She said that when initially getting the procedure she wanted she felt like the "pressure was insane" to get other treatments that the clinic was offering. She said: "When you have three, four people surrounding you saying 'you need this' it was like I've got no choice, have I?"
The website for the clinic is now defunct but social media pages appear to be live at the time of publishing. Milly endured the physical trauma of the botched procedure but her mental health was also severely affected.
She said: "At first it was horrendous, I didn't want to go anywhere. I wasn't a very nice person in that two weeks, I ended up falling out with people that were close to me because I was so angry, I kind of had to just get over it, I guess."
Milly is still going through treatment to mend what went wrong and she still doesn't know how long it will take. A year on she decided to share her experience online and was shocked to find out many other had been through the same thing.
She said: "I didn't expect it to blow up on TikTok, I woke up in the morning like 'what is going on?', I got so many TikTok notifications and was surprised by the comments saying 'this happened to me too.'"
Despite the journey she's been on, she made it clear that she was not against the procedure and was not against people making tweaks to their appearance. She implored people to go with a "reputable doctor" and to make sure if people do go through with it that they are completely sure.
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