Katie Lowden was scrolling through her phone on social media when she paused on a post for a cosmetic procedure.
“My newsfeed was full of cosmetic surgery. It was almost like it was coming out of my phone and looking at me like, you need this done.”
The advert was for an ‘eight-point facelift’ which promised Katie a younger looking appearance using injections of facial fillers and the anti-wrinkle treatment Botox in eight areas on the face.
The mum-of-four says she had always felt self-conscious and just “wanted to look like everybody else”.
She hoped the treatment would boost her confidence.
So she booked in.
But that appointment was the start of three years of “hell”.
Katie’s body reacted to the product that was injected and her face began to swell, with hard lumps forming under her skin.
After a failed attempt to dissolve the dermal filler back at the clinic, she continued to experience flare ups of swelling.
She approached the NHS for help and was prescribed steroids.
At one time doctors sent her for cancer tests.
A biopsy revealed some of the filler product had moved from her face down into her neck.
Katie moved her wedding over concerns her face would be swollen.
“It knocked my confidence, made me feel upset, embarrassed.
“I said to my partner ‘I don’t want to wake up tomorrow, I don’t want to wake up feeling like this.'”
More than two years later, Katie is still undergoing corrective work to get her face back to how it looked before the facelift.
Katie is one of a growing number of cosmetic clients who are experiencing complications in the UK after seeing procedures advertised on social media.
Dr Sach Mohan, founder of Revere Clinics, has a client list that is increasingly made up of corrective work where the patient has found their practitioner on social media.
“These Instagram injectors simply are non-medical professionals that aren’t licensed to perform these treatments who are just taking advantage of the public, preying on, on the fact that they don’t necessarily have the resources to go out and firstly research what is the most suitable treatment for them, and unfortunately falling prey to shoddy products,” Dr Mohan said.
Katie said it felt like online content pushing her cosmetic treatments and promotions was “difficult not to click on”.
She told ITV News that social media “100 per cent” played a part in her decision to have the eight-point facelift.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) regulates the promotions of adverts we see in the UK.
It is against the law in this country to advertise anti-wrinkle treatments including Botox to the general public because it is a prescription only medicine (POM).
But an ITV News survey of the social media accounts of beauty clinics in five UK locations found that nearly 90 per cent were POMs.
When the ASA finds an advert that breaks the rules, it can remove it.
Nicky Baker, ASA compliance executive, told ITV News: “It’s not for the ASA to regulate products or practitioners, but it is our job to regulate advertising, and let’s be clear, no one should be seeing ads for Botox in this country.
“It’s against the rules. So we’re here to try to identify and stamp it out as quickly as we can.
“We use our world leading active ad-monitoring system to help effectively trawl at huge pace and scale social media, trying to find ads for Botox.
“So to give you a sense of that scale, last year alone, our active ad-monitoring system identified over half a million social media posts looking for Botox ads.
“And of those posts, we reported over 25,000 for takedowns from the social media platform.”
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