If I can save one person from getting Bellafill, I'll feel better. My photos tell a story of a destructive edema that started about 2 weeks after I had 8 vials of Bellafill injected. I have notified both the manufacturer and of course, my injector, who are on the Bellafill website as a contact for my area. My face is pretty much ruined by the edema, as you can see. I no longer even look like myself. I'm now under the care of a dermatologist I also found on the Bellafill website. She tells me that the edema will last as long as the Bellafill does because Bellafill "draws water" to it. I just finished spending another $4,000.00 on other fillers to try to remedy some of the damage that over 5 months of edema under the skin have caused. I had the Bellafill to prevent marionette lines and nasolabial lines from forming and the Bellafill has caused me to develop both of these. I now look at minimum 5 years older at least than prior to the Bellafill injections and suffer from an ongoing medical problem (edema) that I did not have prior to having Bellafill. I will need treatment for 5 years at least for this, and the damage will continue as long as the edema does. Please, please do yourself a favor and RUN away from anyone who suggests Bellafill to you. It is a nightmare waiting to happen. Use another filler that is reversible, and doesn't have the potential to compromise the lymphatic drainage in your face. Updated on 17 Sep 2021: I left some out of sequence images in this "transition" and wanted to ensure that this was corrected. So I'm reposting the timeline of my transition from 1 day preinjection to the present. I am now being treated and so look better than I did, but the treatment will have to continue until the Bellafill goes away (5 years or whenever). Updated on 19 Sep 2021: Shown here are 2 pockets of fluid on both sides of my mouth that have now been there for almost 6 months since the Bellafill injections. Again, my dermatologist says there is no way of knowing if and when these will resolve. The supplement that she has me on for the edema has done nothing to make these areas improve yet. Phones don't take great close-ups unfortunately. Updated on 5 Oct 2021: So, still seeing a dermatologist weekly at the moment, and have scheduled 2 follow ups with another dermatologist just to see if they have any other possible ideas to help with this edema, and 2 plastic surgeons. My current derm has injected 4 vials of Voluma so far and 2 of Vollure to see if she can help lift my sagging face back up. I'm taking a daily supplement (Water Ease) which helps enormously, but if I forget to take it, I look just like I looked after the Bellafill did its damage. So, the supplement is just keeping the swelling at bay--not actually healing anything. The pockets of fluid alongside my mouth are still therem along with the deep grooves that have formed on both sides of my mouth. There are now 2 small pockets of edema above MY EYEBROWS where, for who knows what reason, the injector also placed some Bellafill, according to the treatment chart. There are many areas where my current dermatologist says she can't understand why Bellafill would have been injected there. The worse part is that my entire facial expression has been altered by this process with the Bellafill and I don't look happy like I used to. I look angry all the time as the edema around the eyes and above them has given me an angry look when my face is at rest. I have to focus on what my expression looks like, and I've discovered that looking angry makes you feel angry, weirdly. I find myself worrying about things like how I hold my face so that it doesn't droop. Terrible. REPEAT ADVICE: Walk quickly away from Bellafill. I wish I had. Updated on 10 Jul 2022: So, end of story: I ultimately came to the conclusion that the only way to get rid of the Bellafill was to have it surgically removed. I went to 4 dermatologists who were all familiar with and most of them offered Bellafill in their practice. None of them seemed to think that there was any reason not to believe that the Bellafill was causing my ongoing edema. There just wasn't anything they could do about it. One of them put me on a supplement called "WaterEase" that I highly recommend if you have edema issues. It certainly helped some. But after more than a year, the edema never resolved. I could literally grab a hunk of my face and it was squishy. Ultimately, I consulted 3 plastic surgeons, none of whom were aiming to "remove the Bellafill" especially, but there certainly was some improvement to be expected from a mini-facelift, so I opted for that. My surgeon told me at that he was going to "try" to scrape a little of the Bellafill out. But he never had to. He said that when he made the incisions to do the mini facelift and lifted the skin, that this gelationous "stuff" just oozed out. He said it was obvious that it was Bellafill. The day of and the day after the surgery, it was obvious that the edema was gone. My face was so much thinner! I looked like me again! I was told by my injector that the "medical director" at Suneva said that "Bellfill can't cause edema." I had read a trial that is on Suneva's own website that showed one patient with ongoing edema still after 24 weeks that hadn't resolved. So that's not true. Bellafill can cause edema. And not one medical professional that I saw in the past year had any problem whatsoever accept that Bellafill could have caused my edema. After my surgery, and the removal of the Bellafill, which was not really by design, but Thank God it "removed itself" the edema is completely resolved. It cost me a LOT of money, but more than that, it cost me over a year of my life--running around to doctors, massaging my face, trying this solution and that solution. It also made me feel self conscious and caused me no end of anxiety. I'm glad that my story had a happy ending. Obviously, not everyone who gets Bellafill gets ongoing edema that requires surgery to resolve. But I did. And the person in the study on the Bellafill website did. Which means that someone else could too. I don't want that someone else to be you. The photos I'm posting show me the day before the surgery, and the day after. I'm about 6 weeks out from surgery now, so still healing...in more ways than one. Updated on 26 Aug 2022: So I’m about 4 months out from mini-facelift surgery, which also caused the incidental removal of the Bellafill. Looking ever so much better. I can feel my face again! No more wads of Bellafill in my nasolabial folds and chin! The edema has not returned and I don’t expect it will.
