A 63-year-old woman who wanted to look younger almost died when she was injected with fake Botox.
Marcelle King, from Poole, Dorset, England, saw an advert on Facebook for the Botox injection and a simple treatment in west London.
She drove to what she assumed would be a clinic, only to end up arriving at a house, reports Liverpool Echo.
Marcelle said: “This guy turned up and I saw he’d driven up in a brand new BMW and that gave me no cause for concern.
“The only question I asked him was if he was going to use those fine needles like I’ve seen on TV.
“And he held up what looked like a dog vaccination needle to me and said no these are better.”
The man, named Ozan Melin, proceeded to inject Marcelle, who paid him £300 for the procedure.
Rather than achieve the expected result, Marcelle noticed that there was “no change whatsoever” after two days. So, two weeks later she booked in again.
Marcelle said: “Round two was excruciatingly painful, he did say ‘I don’t dilute as recommended because it works quicker’.
“It was like being burnt with cigarette ends and at one point I put my hand up and said I can’t take any more.
“I gave him another £100 and I actually couldn’t wait to get out of there because I could feel my forehead really burning.”
She continued: “By the time I got in the car my forehead was swelling like Frankenstein’s monster and it was really red and really burning.”
Marcelle claims Ozan Melin told her to take ibuprofen, but it didn’t help.
She said: “They rushed me into resus, I was in there for about six hours.
“My face felt like chemical burning like it was just on fire.”
Emergency medication was given to her to halt the effects of whatever it was that was injected into her face.
Marcelle said: “Apparently I came quite close to death.”
It is not known exactly what Ozan Melin injected into Marcelle’s faces. The police suspect it was a substance he’d imported from China.
It took three weeks for the swelling on Marcelle’s face to calm down and left her with permanent damage to her facial muscles.
According to a BBC report, Melin was jailed for four years in June 2018 on two counts of GBH.
On April 2 2019, Melin’s sentence was reduced to two years after Court of Appeal judges overturned one of his convictions.