Botox by the Bog: Britain’s New Beauty Horror Show
How dodgy needles, hotel-room fillers and toilet-cubicle jabs are clogging your NHS while real patients wait for life-saving care.
Not so long ago, I wrote with my usual mix of eye-rolls and disbelief, about the clever folks who fly to Turkey or Mexico for cheap nose jobs and tummy tucks. They come flapping back to Britain faster than their budget airline can refuel. Then they demand the NHS fix their crooked nostrils or infected belly buttons. Bless them.
Let me be clear before some keyboard warrior or stalker fires abuse at me. I’m not against surgery when there’s an actual, medically sound reason for it. Take my own impressive collection of scars. Each one earned honourably through a cheerful mix of scalpels, chemotherapy drips and enough radiotherapy to make Chernobyl blush. Those procedures were necessary. Having your forehead ironed flat because your mate’s wedding photographer owns a 50mm lens with no mercy? Less so.
It’s your face, your body, your problem… until of course, it goes wrong and becomes my problem, as an NHS taxpayer, when you show up at A&E because a man called Vlad in a Turkish basement accidentally stapled your eyebrow to your ear.
This week, my spleen nearly exploded reading the Chartered Trading Standards Institute’s latest report. Apparently, it’s now a trendy option to have cosmetic injections done not just in cheap hotel rooms but in public toilets. Yes, you read that right; the same cubicle where last night’s kebab met its undignified end is now your Botox boutique. I’ve endured bone marrow transplants that were less traumatising than this mental image.
We are living in the Wild West of wrinkle smoothing. No national regulation. No qualifications needed. Just a hypodermic needle, an Instagram account and a public bog. If you find this shocking, you clearly haven’t spent enough time loitering in Britain’s toilets.
Meanwhile, those of us who endured cancer get to chuckle darkly from the back row. I’ve had enough jabs, drips and radioactive dye pumped into me to light up a small village, but even I draw the line at paying a stranger called Chantelle forty quid to squirt mystery goop into my crow’s feet next to a Dyson hand dryer.
The cosmetic industry is now worth an eye-watering £11.7 billion. For context, that’s enough money to fund radiotherapy machines, nurses and life-saving drugs for actual cancer patients who didn’t just fancy a bigger backside for festival season. Instead, we have a postcode lottery where a teenager can cross a border and come back with a new pair of lips, a new pair of buttocks; and a healthy chance of an infection that will queue-jump every cancer patient at the local NHS hospital.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m sympathetic to people who feel insecure and want to boost their confidence. When I lost my hair, my eyebrows, my dignity and any hope of fitting in normal trousers, I too fantasised about tweaks and fixes. But I never once thought, “I know — I’ll go inject cheap filler into my face in a hotel bathroom and then scream for the NHS when I look like a bruised balloon animal.”
We don’t let toddlers play with chemotherapy IVs or hand out radiotherapy machines at car boot sales. Yet we allow pretty much anyone with a pulse and an Instagram filter to poke acid into your forehead or pump filler into your backside. It’s madness.
The CTSI report is begging the government to introduce actual regulation. They’re right. I’m tired of reading about people dying because someone with a GCSE in hairdressing decided they were now a plastic surgeon after watching two YouTube videos and a Love Island episode.
So here’s my recurring plea, delivered with age, wisdom and a splash of common sense. Next time you’re tempted to pop into a toilet cubicle for a bargain jab that promises to erase your wrinkles or inflate your bum overnight, maybe, just maybe, reconsider. Ask for credentials. Demand proper standards.
Your NHS is already fighting to zap tumours, deliver bone marrow transplants and shoot radiation at precisely the right bit of you; thanks to those glamorous pinprick tattoos I’ve banged on about before. It really doesn’t need to mop up your bathroom Botox disaster too.
Question it. Demand sense. Keep the NHS for cancer patients… not for botched bargain butts.
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Chris Geiger, Author of The Cancer Survivors Club.
Daily Dose of Disbelief!
Bsky: @chrisgeiger.com
Bsky: @thecancersurvivorsclub.com
Bsky: @dailydoseofdisbelief.com
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