A new bride claims she ended up postponing her own wedding after botched lip fillers left her hiding behind a face mask for more than a year. Emma Griffin, 40, says she was left with "hotdog lips" after getting her lip filler topped up in February 2019, with the aesthetics practitioner having "massively overfilled" them.
According to Emma, the practitioner, who she'd found after moving to a new area, had been medically trained but didn't follow proper "protocols" during the procedure. Emma was left unable to "look in the mirror or smile", with her lips so overfilled she was left without any pigment in her top lip.
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Emma, from Tuxford, Nottinghamshire, said: "My lips had swelled like two massive hot dog sausages and I was like 'oh my god'. She said 'the swelling will go down' but it never really went down. It was awful.
"She'd actually injected into my water line and filler loves water so it just keeps feeding and feeding. I ended up with a lump just a bit bigger than a grain of rice underneath my lips - it looked like I'd had a stroke on one side.
"It was like a snarl - I smiled and you couldn't see my tooth on one side because there was just this lump there. I didn't have any definition in my lips - all I wanted was a cupid's bow and a bit more volume but it was just straight across the top. You could stick a pencil on my top lip and it would stay there."
According to Emma, the botched fillers had "a massive effect" on her confidence, and she felt she had to put filters over every photo she took of herself. After Emma's now husband, Owen Griffin, 37, proposed, she says she felt too "disgusted and mortified" by her lips to even consider having any wedding pics taken.
Emma continued: "We didn't plan the wedding until I'd managed to get someone to dissolve and redo my lips because I couldn't bear the thought of my lips looking like that on my wedding day."
Having since trained in aesthetics herself, Emma now knows where the practitioner went wrong, having had total confidence in her at the time.
She explained: "I thought 'well it will disappear because filler breaks down over time. I normally have them done every 9 to 12 months so in nine months they'll be fine'. We were in lockdown at that point anyway, I was quite lucky because we had to wear face coverings then so I kind of hid behind a face mask for a year.
"As I started to train I realised the lump in my water line was never actually going to go and that's when I started to freak out a little bit. Everyone I was approaching to dissolve them kept saying 'you need to go back to the original practitioner' but I didn't trust her to go anywhere near my face again."
After a year of being turned away from practitioners she'd pleaded with to fix her overfilled pout, Emma finally found someone willing while attending an advanced training course. They were thankfully able to dissolve her lips in February this year, refilling and reshaping them in March. It apparently took 36 hours to break down her lips, using three millilitres of dissolving agent.
Emma recalled: "She said 'it's the worst dissolve I've ever had to do, the amount of [dissolving agent] I had to use is shocking' because they weren't going down. I'm over the moon with how they look now, I don't think I look bad for 40."
With her lips finally fixed, Emma felt confident enough to start planning her wedding, tying the knot with Owen in July following an 18-month-long engagement.
She added: "I got married, I can smile, I can look in the mirror - I just feel like myself again. I've had them refilled and then I've had to have them tattooed as well because they were so overfilled I lost all the pigment in my top lip so it had white patches on.
"You can lose a little bit of pigment with lip filler because the skin is stretching but when they're massively overfilled like that it's a direct result of the skin being stretched far too much.
The reality is I've got to keep having them done now because my skin is stretched - when I got them dissolved they were just like saggy and limp and that will never go back. If I don't put filler in to give them some sort of structure, they just look deflated."
Going forward, Emma is encouraging others considering getting lip fillers to use aesthetics to 'enhance' rather than dramatically 'modify' their facial features so as to avoid damaging their skin.
Have you had a bad experience with lip fillers or cosmetic surgery? Email us at julia.banim@reachplc.com
