Which celebrity is the best example of plastic surgery gone wrong?
Prepare to suffer nightmares with the 10 worst cases of plastic surgery addicts. Actresses such as Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry or Gwyneth Paltrow have explained that Hollywood stars touch up their faces to extend their working lives: so they can spend 10 more years embodying main characters, "before they only offer you roles of mother or grandmother" . But what happens if the surgeon makes a mistake, or if the patient "skips" operations? The result ranges from painful to terrifying. And luckily, Nicole, Gwyneth, and Halle didn't go that far. But there are others that do, and here we present them: 10 famous people who lose their faces. Not out of embarrassment, but literally.
1 / Jocelyn Wildenstein: the “Cat Woman” of plastic surgery
She was born in Switzerland in 1940, with the name of Jocelyn Perisset, and was a model and actress with a feline look and meowing beauty, who starred in an erotic comedy in France: “Servez-vous mesdames” (prohibited to persons under 18 years of age). She had romances with various producers, but her life changed during a safari in Africa. She where she met her, while they were hunting lions, the French billionaire Alec Wildenstein: art dealer ... and fanatic of cats. And they say that out of love, Jocelyn decided to become one.
Young Jocelyn began her "transformation" with collagen injections to the lips, cheekbones and forehead. The work was not entirely good and she had to go through the scalpel to correct the mistakes. She then put implants on her chin and cheeks, and did a brow lift to enhance her "catlike" look. But as a result of the previous interventions, her face did not respond to that operation as everyone expected.
Jocelyn's face became a lifeless mask, and successive attempts to fix it in the operating room only made it worse. The media then renamed her "Wildenstein's Bride", alluding to Frankenstein's monster. And all this, after having spent almost 4 million dollars on plastic surgery.
In 1997, Wildenstein the cat had reason to remove her nails when she caught her husband in bed with a 21-year-old Russian model. He threatened her with a gun, allegedly mistaking her for a thief. She called her lawyer, and the divorce made her one of the biggest billionaires on Fifth Avenue in New York: the judge awarded her $ 2.5 billion from the Wildenstein fortune, plus $ 200,000 a month for her expenses.
And with the money, Jocelyn continued to operate. Especially with breast augmentations, she determined to show that she could continue wearing cleavage ... and that her addiction to plastic surgery knows no limits.
After a long courtship with designer Lloyd Klein (26 years younger than her), the millionaire was arrested for assault on Lloyd himself. When police arrived at her shared apartment in Trump Tower New York, he had locked her in a closet and held the doors as best she could, her face covered in scratch marks, scissor wounds and hot wax injuries.
Jocelyn's first photo in this article corresponds to the assault trial. And the next two summarize her transformation pretty well.
Today she is 81 years old, and we can say that Jocelyn Wildenstein no longer looks like a person ... or a cat. She looks, more like, an alien.
She would make an excellent match with the next character on the list.
2 / “The Black Alien”: my body, my canvas
"The Black Alien" is an artist (or so) who has literally transformed into a black alien. His real name is Anthony Loffredo, he is 32 years old and he is a fan of tattoos and piercings that he decided, with plastic surgery, to go even further. His is no longer a transformation, but rather a mutation. Below these lines, we see him on the left with his old face, and on the right, with his current appearance. He is not in makeup nor is it a computer retouched image. His face is today, truly, as we see it.
Anthony Loffredo was not an actor, but a security guard. But with a mutation worthy of the "X-Men", his life is enough for a movie. At the age of 24 he left France and moved to Australia, where he first started with tribal tattoos, piercings of all kinds and scarifications. Then he switched to subcutaneous grafts, and little by little the idea of mutating in "The Black Alien" matured. He then entered the field of plastic surgery, without hesitation.
Loffredo made skin grafts to make it more flaky. He then he cut his tongue lengthwise, to have it forked like snakes. Next he cut off his ears, later he had surgery on his eyes, the next thing was a vertical cut on his upper lip, and his most recent intervention was… cutting off his nose. But he did not do it in Australia but in Spain, because Australian law prohibits such an operation, except for justified medical reasons. It seems that Spanish surgeons have less scruples and more noses.
He tells "The Black Alien" that, at the moment, he has only completed 21% of the body mutation that he has planned. Did we mention the "X - Men" mutants? Perhaps his film is more like "Men In Black." At the moment, this Black Alien is a celebrity in France; With his "bowling" he pays his bills (those for plastic surgery, and the others) and defends his operations with the arguments of an artist who uses his body as a canvas. Visionary, or just “crazy”? We suspect that his otolaryngologist thinks the latter.
3 / Jennifer Gray: when you don't have to undergo much surgery for plastic surgery to ruin your career
No black tattoos, no cat faces: Jennifer Gray just had a rhinoplasty. But that was enough for the protagonist of "Dirty Dancing" to throw her career in the trash. Her natural aquiline nose was the hallmark of a face with personality. When she took it off she began to have an ordinary face: as Jennifer herself has said, that of "someone who looks a bit like Jennifer Gray." In fact, hers did not recognize her own fans. And in Hollywood they stopped hiring her, because who wants the girl from "Dirty Dancing" if the girl from "Dirty Dancing" is not recognized?
Her true features were those of a girl of Jewish origin, daughter of the great Joel Gray: the prestigious performer, singer and dancer who won the Oscar for best supporting actor for playing the master of ceremonies of "Cabaret." Somehow Jennifer cut herself out of her bloodline with her operation. And she herself has confessed that "surgery on my nose was the worst mistake of my life." But she has also explained the painful circumstances that led her to do so.
Jennifer Gray made her debut before the cameras at the age of 19, in a soda commercial. And she from the beginning she ran into the same barrier every time: she was rejected in almost all castings, precisely for "not conforming to the prevailing standards of beauty" at the time. I mean, through her nose. And when she most touched her self-esteem, she suffered a tragic car accident with her then-boyfriend, Matthew Broderick.
Jennifer was dating Matthew in secret. They met while filming the comedy "All in one day" together, but the studio thought that their courtship was bad for the promotion of the film because they were brothers in it. That's why the couple opted for discretion on their vacations, traveling to a remote area of Ireland. There, Matthew Broderick fell asleep as he drove a rented car; he invaded the opposite lane and they crashed head-on into another car.
The two occupants of the other vehicle, a mother and her young daughter, were killed instantly. Matthew and Jennifer left the hospital on their own accord. But the actress was never the same again.
A few months later "Dirty Dancing" was released. With a budget of just $ 6 million, it grossed $ 215 million at the box office. And the eyes of the whole world turned to the young leading actress of hers ... and to her nose. With her own love cracked by guilt after the accident, and affected by depression and severe neck pain (which she still suffers from), Jennifer's self-esteem was diluted. And then she decided to erase from her face that nose that she had given him so much trouble.
Her plastic surgery removed his nose, and her popularity. At least, over time she was able to recover her career. But not like the big star that everyone expected her to be, but with the kind of jobs that real "stars" always reject: supporting roles in the shadow of other performers, family sitcoms (with recurring jokes on their noses), or even a participation in “Dancing with the Stars” (the American version of “Look who is dancing”). Contest in which, by the way, Jennifer won.
The one who could not participate in that program is the well-known singer that we talk about below. At the first dance move, the seams on her face skip the same.
4 / Axl Rose: the other side of rock & roll
The singer and leader of the "Guns & Roses" is today as much a friend of plastic surgery as he was in his day of drugs and alcohol. He was born with the name William Bruce Rose, but he legally changed it to the one we all know today, among other reasons to scandalize his family: "Axl Rose" is the acronym for "Oral Sex", and his mother and stepfather were fundamentalist Christians of the Pentecostal Church. He sure was delighted with the new name of his son.
Already in his maturity, Axl was arrested 30 times for public disorders, almost always related to drugs and alcohol. And in a good part of his legal proceedings he represented himself, without lawyers. Today, at 59 years old, if he had operated on himself his appearance would not be much worse. He has so many facelifts that his face looks like a drum.
Plastic surgery experts say that Axl Rose has had about 30 operations in recent years. The most obvious are the multiple lifts on his forehead, which have left him an expression of perpetual surprise. And to the skin tightening should be added a rhinoplasty, cheek implants and skin whitening with bleaching chemicals, which have left this redhead more rosy than "Babe, the brave pig."
For some reason, the lead singer of “Terminator 2” (“You Could Be Mine”) has concentrated all his operations from the neck up. From the neck down, on the other hand, he hasn't minded showing off the natural beer belly of someone with his lifestyle. That is why the rocker has become a caricature of himself. A strangely rejuvenated “Benjamin Button” above the shoulders; below, this singer is another song.
5 / Nikki Cox: unhappy forever
Born in Los Angeles in 1978, Nicole Avery Cox was an actress of stunning beauty who had precisely a brief role in "Terminator 2", and who became famous with the irreverent sitcom "Unhappy Forever" (not available, unfortunately, in no platform). The role of Nikki Cox in that series was traced to that of Christina Applegate in "Married with Children" (available on Amazon Prime Video). And not by chance, both series were from the same producers. But as Christina grew up as an entertainer in the realm of comedy, the only thing about Nikki that grew up was… her lips.
After "Unhappy forever" she spent four years in another series, "Las Vegas", along with the legendary "Sonny Corleone", James Caan. And at that stage, success smiled back at Nikki Cox. But after succeeding in two series, the actress decided (for some unknown reason) that her physique was not attractive enough. And she injected collagen into her lips, with the same impetus as a gambler in a casino.
Bottox injections haven't helped either. And at just 43 years of age, due to plastic surgery, the youthful Nikki Cox has mutated into a strangely swollen face with apparent allergic reactions. At least, she does not live in the Alternate Universe of Axl Rose or Jocelyn Waldenstein: Nikki admits her mistake, publicly regrets having retouched a natural beauty that did not need any retouching, and has been away from the cameras for almost 10 years, limiting herself to putting on her voice in cartoon soap operas. Unhappy forever? Hopefully not.
6 / Heidi Montag, a girl of 10… operations in one day
Heidi Montag will not go down in film history for her roles as an actress: just a brief intervention in the Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston comedy "Follow the roll." But she does occupy a notorious place in the history of "celebrities" ... because she has an amazing record: that of being the person who has undergone the largest number of plastic surgery operations, in a single day.
Heidi had up to 10 operations, in one sitting, having already undergone a rhinoplasty and a breast augmentation! And looking at the photo to the right, someone might think that her surgeon deserves a round of applause. But no: even if her face has not been shattered, her career has been shattered.
Heidi herself has told that, for the unfortunate day of the 10 operations, her initial plan was only two: a rhinoplasty and a (new) breast augmentation. But days before her intervention, her surgeon did a detailed review of all the parts of her body that were "improvable" (come on, the same as Julian McMahon did in "Nip / Tuck"). And since she was going into the operating room, he encouraged her to have surgery on everything at the same time, giving her a discount! As they said at the fairs, “One, twenty dollars; three, forty dollars ”.
The result: Hedi Montag had a brow lift, double thigh liposuction (inner and outer part), cheekbones fat injections, back fat extractions, ear suspensor grafts and a filing of chin, in addition to rhinoplasty and breast implants planned from the beginning. The result, who was going to say it, was not what was expected.
Heidi achieved, in effect, the figure and appearance of an explosive "sex symbol". But she, transformed into a Living Doll, she became as expressionless as a real doll. It's not that she doesn't have expression lines: it's that she doesn't have expression. As we see on these lines, her face is an Adamantium mask capable of containing the most intense emotional earthquake, preventing it from reaching the surface.
And that's not the worst: Heidi Montag had surgery looking to launch her career, but the long-awaited contracts did not come (beyond "reality TV"). And her budding fortune evaporated, in her surgeon's pockets, and in those of others. In her own words, "there are agents, lawyers, managers, tax, hairdresser and makeup (...) It was really overwhelming."
Nobody said becoming a Barbie was easy. But beware: becoming Ken is not.
7 / The “Human Ken” of Brazil and his 103 operations
Rodrigo Alves (Sao Paulo, 1983) is a true “celebrity” in his native Brazil. It is said that he has made millions as a television presenter, but he was already rich before. He lived for years on a pension provided by his (millionaire) father's, and from the rents of different properties in Brazil, the United States and on the Spanish Costa del Sol. And with all that money, he has tried to buy what Mother Nature did not give him: a body to be proud of. The male beauty model he chose was that of Ken the doll, Barbie's boyfriend. And one thing he has achieved: today, Rodrigo Alves looks like plastic.
His countless rhinoplasties have made him lose so much nasal tissue that in the United States they refuse to operate on him, for safety reasons, and his latest surgeries have been done in Thailand. He has, at the moment, 103 operations. And he is addicted to book plastic surgery, diagnosed with dysmorphia (pathological contempt for his own body). He started with implants in his arms, to appear more muscular. Then he went through the gallery of "touch-ups" that we have already seen in other cases (chin, lips, eyebrows, etc.) and through an unprecedented one on this list: abdominal implants. Because, why "work out" in the gym for a "six-pack", when your surgeon can give you a plastic one?
The Brazilian “Human Ken” has continued to undergo surgery, although his doctors warned him that, at this point, he was in serious danger of death in the operating room. His nostrils have become blocked by internal bleeding, he has completely lost his sense of smell, he has many tissues at risk of necrosis and he has been warned that he may lose his nose. But nothing has stopped him: in early 2020, he announced that he was "going from Ken to Barbie" (the comparison is not ours) with a gender reassignment. Now Rodrigo Alves is Jessica Alves.
She tells Alves that from the age of 3 or 4 she knew that she was a girl, but that she tried to transform herself into a male icon like Ken, to be "all man" in the eyes of her father. And with Alves Sr. now deceased, Alves Jr. can finally be who he wishes to be, thanks to plastic surgery. He is 37 years old. Good luck, Jessica.
8 / Joan van Ark, Joan of Arc from soap operas
Joan van Ark, whose name (in Dutch) literally means Joan of Arc, is a star of USA soap operas. Her husband is a former NBC reporter, and they were married in Germany in the 1960s, when he was in the army, stationed at a US Army military base on German soil. As a honeymoon, her husband prepared a European "tour" for all the cities that were important in the biography of the real Joan of Arc. Circumstance that her evil tongues take advantage of to say that, if they burned her at the stake like Juana, Joan var Ark would burn very well, because of all the plastic she wears on top of her.
The actress is awarded at least two skin lifts, a brow lift, collagen fillers, bottox injections, and chemical and laser peels for skin whitening. But other plastic surgery treatments are not ruled out. She is now 78 years old. And to be honest, more than Joan of Arc she looks like the knight who guarded the Holy Grail, at the end of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."
Joan is a good example of what Nicole Kidman and company said: Hollywood offers you more work, for longer, if you look younger. But at a certain point they will also stop offering you papers, because you will no longer seem like a normal person, neither young nor old. That is why in Joan Van Ark's career, with 104 series and films at the moment, soap operas such as "Dallas", "The Young and the Restless", "California" or "Holidays at sea" predominate. Where normality, so to speak, is not so important.
And in any case, Van Ark's appearance will never be as terrifying as that of the next actress.
9 / Hang Mioku: For your safety, do not try to do it at home
Little joke with the following case: that of a Korean actress and model who operated on herself. Her name is Hang Mioku, and at only 30 years old she had already had 20 operations in Japan. Japanese surgeons refused to operate on her more times, noting the psychological imbalance of the young woman, obviously addicted to plastic surgery. So she opted to do the work herself, as if her face were an Ikea piece of furniture.
Mioku got surgical silicone from a Korean doctor, and injected it directly into her face. And when she ran out, she wanted to complete the task by injecting herself with cooking oil. The result, we already noticed, was monstrous. Under these lines.
Korean television became interested in her drama, and they made a collection to raise funds to pay for new plastic surgery appearances. This time, to fix the mess. Doctors subjected her to 10 reconstruction operations, removing 60 grams of silicone, oil and other indeterminate substances from her face, and another 200 grams from her neck. They were thus able to reduce the inflammation ... but they did not improve the texture of her skin, and on top of it her face was covered with scars. A second disaster.
At 50 years old, this woman's facial mess seems beyond repair. And yet it could have been worse, because other cases like yours (yes: there are more would-be celebrities who have injected themselves with substances) have ended in painful deaths from septicemia. Hang Mioku can still say thank you when she looks in the mirror. If she does.
10 / The Bogdanoff brothers: the twins have a thousand operations
The brothers Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff are two French twins, famous in their native country for presenting popular science television programs ... but also famous for their multiple plastic surgery operations. They claim to be experts in mathematics, theoretical physics and quantum physics, and boast doctorates in the field from the University of Burgundy. And one thing is certain: their faces seem to have been sucked into a black hole, stretched out to infinity on the Event Horizon.
With the good plant of their youth, it is not surprising that they were successful on television. Stranger are his Doctoral Theses, denounced as false by those who have reviewed them. Nobel and Fields Medal winners say that "their articles consist of jargon from various fields of mathematical physics, string theory and quantum gravity, arranged in syntactically correct but semantically meaningless sentences." What has been charlatans. But what does the Bogdanoffs care what other people say? His critics sure don't have his hair!
Their faces reflect the rigorous operations: chin and cheek implants, collagen on the lips, brow lifts, skin tightening. All of them especially worthy operations, given the proven toughness of their faces. The two cheeks are 73 years old, and the photo above these lines corresponds to the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. Without a doubt, their lives are from a movie ... like those of the other protagonists on this list.
Horror movie, in most cases. But from a movie at the end of the day.
Have you been interested in this article? Unfortunately, the gorgeous Hedy Lamarr was also the victim of surgery: the actress who invented wi-fi (and who stars in one of our best articles).
Although, for beauties with tortuous lives, the case of Gene Tierney is also amazing: the star who contracted a lethal virus because a fan did not respect the proper confinement
And if you're not as interested in patients as surgeons, you can always take a look at our list of the 12 best doctor series you can watch on platforms.
Of course: we anticipate that no fiction can surpass the reality ... of the plastic surgery addicts that we have just met. And there are more, many more. All waiting for his new intervention ...
