A newlywed has claimed she needed to postpone her wedding because she didn’t want to walk down the aisle with undissolved botched filler.
Emma Griffin had to look for a new beautician to top up her lip filler after moving to a new area.
She found an aesthetics practitioner in February 2019 who claimed she was medically trained, so Emma booked an appointment.
But she’s accused the practitioner of ‘massively overfilling’ her lips, leaving her with ‘massive hotdog lips’.
Emma, 40, ended up hiding behind a face mask while she desperately tried to find someone to dissolve the swollen and lumpy work.
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 did. 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.
‘Everything aesthetically about them was so wrong, it had a massive effect on my confidence and my life.’
The impact on her confidence was such that, when her now husband proposed, her first thoughts were of how she couldn’t face a wedding with her lips as they were.
She said: ‘My husband asked me to marry him and the first thing I said was: “I can’t have any photos with my lips looking like this” because I was that disgusted and mortified that I looked like that.
‘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.
‘I didn’t even want to look in the mirror or smile. Every morning I would wake up, and it would just be these things stuck on my face.’
It wasn’t until March this year that Emma was finally able to find a practitioner willing to tackle the job and dissolve and reshape her pout.
Since training in aesthetics herself, Emma says she understands the practitioner she went to did not follow proper ‘protocols’ when injecting.
She’d previously had no issues with getting her lips done.
Emma said: ‘She was a medic so in my mind – because I wasn’t qualified at that point – I was totally confident she knew what she was doing.
‘I thought: “well it will disappear because filler breaks down over time. I normally have them done every nine-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.’
When the filler was fixed, Emma was finally feeling confident enough to move forward with wedding planning.
She got married to her husband Owen Griffin, 37, at last in July – 18 months after getting engaged in December 2020.
But the impact of the botched job is felt by Emma to this day, as she’s now forced to get her filler and tattoos topped up yearly to account for ‘over-stretched’ lips.
Emma said: ‘I’m over the moon with how they look now, I don’t think I look bad for 40.
‘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.
‘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.’
Emma now hopes to warn others against getting filler done by anyone they haven’t very thoroughly researched.
She said: ‘Be very careful who you pick when you’re getting stuff stuck in your face.
‘You need to have a free consultation, look at the portfolio, speak to previous clients, check for insurance and Google that practitioner.
‘Do your homework and go steady – you don’t need to have loads of it done, it’s better to build these things up.
‘It should always be within the “golden quarter”, so it should be an enhancement, not a modification which is what ended up happening to me.’
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