Wrongly placed filler at M&K Aesthetics London almost ruined my life

It's been 6 months since I had the proceedure.

I'm updating because the staff have continued to harass me 6 months later on this post, their antagonist bullying in the comments section and no genuine apology in sight is more proof for my low customer service score. Bad work is traumatic enough and destresssing because it is a physical alteration to your face but rudeness, bullying, and harassment on top of it is what makes the experience worse. A genuine business would apologise for the distress caused at the barest minimum which is already a great step, taken into account the patient's perspective and offer some help or support in dealing with the issue. Remember, they wanted to charge me £100 to get the filler removed and I didn't want to patronise their business further so I went somewhere else to get it removed.

-- updates on my face and healing ----
It took 6 sessions with hyaluronidase to remove the filler, spread out over the span of two months. I'm not entirely sure how many units was used. My face is 90% back to normal. There's still a tiny bit of filler above my lip but that's because hyaluronidase needs to be placed in targetted areas and I don't think much hyal was placed above my lip. It's still reducing gradually with time, I think in a few months my face will be 100% back to normal.

I'm 23 years old and I went to get cheek and lip filler as an early birthday gift. There's something important that I wish I knew before getting fillers: Dermal fillers aren't considered a medical practice in the UK. That completely changes everything: The injector doesn't have to see or treat you like a patient, they can, as many do, purely see and treat you as a customer. That means placing their best interest before yours. This could result in being upsold quantities of filler you don't want, need, or should even have, in areas you don't want, need, or should even have. It could also mean that if anything goes wrong instead of trying to help you out and being empathetic to the situation they'll do their best to angrily and condescendingly wash their hands of the whole thing. That's what happened to me. In some cases injectors try to sell you more filler to fix misplaced filler, which doesn't help.

The first meeting with my injector was extremely confrontational and rude, I was quite shocked by this. This was over a misunderstanding over appointment times. I was going to leave however they had already received full payment - not a deposit. That alone is already a red flag.

I requested filler to make my cheekbones more accentuated. The injector said that I had volume loss in my cheeks, and that mid cheek filler would help. That sounded daunting as I didn't want to lose the flatness and contours of my cheeks that I had acquired in my early 20s as I lost the babyfat in my cheeks through ageing and diet and exercise, however she reassured me that mid cheek filler will simply lift my cheekbones and create more contour and definition in the cheekbone area. I said okay and was excited.

She injected my cheeks with Juvederm, was painless. When she showed me my cheeks I was frozen with shock, i was absolutely appalled. When I could finally talk I said that my whole upper face just looked much fuller. She was confused and showed me my before picture, pointing out that my chin looked slimmer because my upper face was bigger. I was completely upset and she should have paused or stopped the appointment with how distraught I was, but no, I was a customer to her, not a patient. She mentioned i looked "dizzy from too much filler" because I was in shock and in the freeze mode of fight or flight from seeing my cheeks then proceeded to do my lips. The shape she gave me was horrible and wasn't like my natural shape. My upper lip is naturally curved on top but she accentuated the pointiness of the very top which didn't fit me. I didn't need lip filler in the first place, I already had full lips and I was just hoping for more definition to my natural shape. I was instead advised that the filler would make look even better since I already had nice lips. I was really upset with the final result and she gaslighted me into believing it was simply swelling but i knew something else was really wrong.

The following week was one of the worst times of my life. Without exaggeration. my face looked awful. It was absolutely huge throughout that week, from swelling, but even worse my cheeks looked odd and scary. I massaged my lips as advised to get rid of the unwanted pointiness which worked but the shape of my lips became odd and bloated. My entire frontal cheek acquired new volume which erased the natural contours of my face, and my features blended in together like the surface of an egg. I knew that there wasn't only filler in the cheekbone area, but that there was filler in the cheek area too because my whole frontal cheek looked filled up in an odd way. I couldn't explain it as I wasn't a professional but I knew that more volume was added in the wrong places, I contacted them and asked them if its possible that the cheekbone filler migrated, they said no. I couldn't sleep, eat, socialise, or go to classes. I cried everyday. After a week I finally gave in and contacted them to please remove the filler because it looked so awful and it was destroying my mental health and life. Our face is our identity and messing it up, especially paying a lot of money to get it messed up and the regret that follows can be absolutely catastrophic for your mental health. She said that she couldn't remove it for free, because the issue "wasn't medical". However the damage and trauma to my mental health was a medical issue. She said to wait another week so that I would "love" the result, but how could I love misplaced filler? I insisted and she said fine, she'd do it for £150 if I booked an appointment. I asked them to do it for free because it had only been a week and I didn't like the result from the very start. after a few hours of deliberation they decided to give me a "special deal" and charge me £100 instead, on top of everything I had already paid and travel costs to get to London, just to reverse the damage they did.

I went somewhere else to get my cheeks dissolved, a very kind, knowledgable, and compassionate clinic. they even greatly reduced the price because they were empathetic to my situation. They mentioned that my whole frontal cheek was filled with filler, not just my cheekbone area. That's why I looked so bad and deformed. I wasn't crazy like the M&k aesthetic tried to suggest. She also mentioned that volume loss isn't an issue with young patients and is corrected in much older patients, so the technique they used for my cheeks were wrong. She also mentioned that 3ml cheek is way too much for a first time filler patient and that 2ml is standard. She had to inject my whole frontal cheek with hyaluronidase to get the filler out. When she injected the right cheek and compared it to my uninjected left cheek, first thing she said was "look, the contour of your cheek is coming back" and I felt like crying. In the hours following the dissolver rapidly worked and the swelling also rapidly went down, my face shrunk down to 1/5th its size on the very first day.

I contacted the clinic that messed up my fillers to let them know what they had done wrong to my cheeks and they called me to let me know that they were "very angry" that I'd suggest that the filler was misplaced. They were angry? but they were the ones who profited from damaging me physically and mentally.

It's been two weeks since my first dissolving session and my face already looks so close to back to normal. The remaining filler is more noticeable to me than others - it mostly looks like weight gain in my cheeks. My life is also starting to get back to normal. I'm grateful. I'll mention the amazing clinic that helped me in a later post or edit (if possible) with permission.

Anyone who doesn't have the tact, skill, or empathy to be physically changing people's face shouldn't be changing people's faces at all.