A 30-year-old mother of one in the United Kingdom has called for a ban on ‘liquid BBLs’ after a botched procedure left her buttocks with leaking black holes and in pain ‘worse than childbirth’.
Monique Sofroniou from London, reportedly booked an appointment to enlarge her bottom after undergoing a ‘Brazilian Butt Lift’ in 2021. The aesthetician spent £3,000 on the non-surgical procedure to have one litre of filler injected into each bum cheek to have her dream look.
But when Monique turned up for the appointment in September 2022, she felt ‘weird’ about being directed to a nearby hotel where she underwent the hour-long filler procedure. Later that evening, she discovered her bum was ‘swollen’ and ‘very red’, and had reached a temperature of 41C.
Monique was immediately rushed to A&E where she was given the news that she had sepsis.
She recalled: ‘After the procedure, I was really lightheaded, then that night I woke up and was being sick everywhere.
‘I felt so ill. I had a temperature of 41 but I was shivering, freezing cold. I was being sick all night.
‘My bum was swollen and very red around the area where you could see where the filler was. It was just getting redder and redder.
‘I went to the hospital and stayed in for a week on an antibiotic drip, but after I just went home with oral antibiotics.
‘It just continued to get worse and worse to the point where I woke up and there were bumps of blisters with fluid inside them.
‘I didn’t want to look at it, it made me feel sick. It was really burning to the point where I had to have ice packs on it, but even to put the ice pack on it where it was touching was agony. It was burning and stinging.
‘It was the worst pain I’ve ever been through in my life, and I’ve had childbirth’.
The surgery requires a person to have fat taken from their abdomen and moved into their hips and bottom to create an hourglass shape.
Monique booked the procedure on the recommendation of a friend, assuming it would be at a clinic and not knowing it was going to be done at a local hotel.
She revealed: ‘I didn’t know it wasn’t going to be done in a clinic.
‘When I got there they met me [at the address] and walked me to an opposite hotel, I thought, “Oh this is a bit weird”.
‘I do think I probably should have walked out at that point and been like “no” but because I knew quite a few people who had been there before I just thought it’d be fine.
‘I thought filler would be a less invasive procedure, it’s not supposed to be dangerous’.
The morning after the injections, she was rushed to Stoke Mandeville Hospital A&E in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.
The mum-of-one was told she had developed sepsis and that the practitioner had used non-dissolvable silicone, rather than hyaluronic acid which is typically used for fillers.
Sepsis occurs when the body reacts to an infection by attacking its own organs and tissues.
After a week in the hospital, the mother returned home but the respite was short-lived,
To her dismay, the skin on her bum had turned black and was oozing out the injected filler.
A surgeon syringed some of the stuff out to see what it was’ explained Monique.
‘I was crying in agony while he was doing it, I said “It’s too painful, you’ve got to stop”.
‘I went home with a plaster on it where he’d put a tiny little hole in one of the blisters – it was filler mixed with blood.
‘The next morning when I woke up, where he’d put the hole into syringe some stuff out, the skin had collapsed in on itself and [the whole area] had gone nearly black.
‘It was awful, I didn’t even want to look, I felt sick. It was so abnormal, I thought “Oh my God, what is going on?”.
‘The surgeon said he thinks it was likely down to the fact that a high volume of this filler was put in and there was no room for it to go.
‘That filler just needed to come out somewhere to the point it caused my skin to die, there was too much pressure on the skin.
‘They didn’t tell me it wasn’t dissolvable. If they did, I’d never have had it done.
Following the gruesome ordeal, Monique has been left with permanent scarring around her buttocks.
Now the mum is sharing her story in a bid to get the ‘high risk’ procedure ‘banned’ or at the very least to encourage tighter regulations.
She said: “I’m quite a strong person, even though I’m fuming I know there are other people going through a lot worse.
“I’m not after sympathy but I just want to spread awareness because I think it needs to be more regulated. I don’t think it will be banned but personally in my opinion I think it should be banned.”
