My wedding was ruined because botched filler gave me ‘hot dog’ lips

A woman says that she was so horrified that her lip fillers left them “looking like hot dogs,” she refused to plan her wedding until they were dissolved.

Emma Griffin, 40, visited an aesthetics practitioner she’d never frequented before — someone who reportedly claimed to be medically trained — to top off her lip filler in February 2019 but was left unable to leave the house without wearing a face mask, allegedly due to the botched job.

However, she said the practitioner “massively overfilled” them and made her looks look like “massive hotdog lips,” she told Kennedy News & Media, adding that she was so embarrassed by her appearance she wore a face mask for a year while desperately trying to find someone to dissolve them.

“We were in lockdown at that point anyway, I was quite lucky because we had to wear face coverings then so I kind of hid behind a face mask for a year,” said Griffin, who is from Nottinghamshire in the UK.

The bride-to-be said the swelling from the fillers never went down — even though the practitioner said it would.

“She’d actually injected into my water line and filler loves water, so it just keeps feeding and feeding,” explained Griffin, herself a salon owner who has since trained as a aesthetics practitioner. “I ended up with a lump just a bit bigger than a grain of rice underneath my lips — it looked like I’d had a stroke on one side.”

Griffin described her smile as a “snarl” after the botched job.

“You couldn’t see my tooth on one side because there was just this lump there,” she said. “Everything aesthetically about them was so wrong; it had a massive effect on my confidence and my life.”

Griffin said that when her now-husband Owen Griffin proposed in December 2020, her swollen and plump lips were immediately on her mind.

“My husband asked me to marry him and the first thing I said was, ‘I can’t have any photos with my lips looking like this,’” she recalled. “Because I was that disgusted and mortified that I looked like that.”

Griffin was finally able to find someone willing to try to dissolve the lip filler in March 2022, claiming it took 3 milliliters of a dissolving agent to fully break down her “overfilled” lips over the course of 36 hours.

With her lips no longer swollen, Griffin was confident enough to plan her wedding, marrying in July 2022, 18 months after getting engaged.

However, the newlywed says she now has to get her filler topped off yearly to give her lips “structure” because, she claims, the previous filler overstretched her lips. In addition, she says she needs to get her lips tattooed every year because she lost pigment, creating white patches.

“You can lose a little bit of pigment with lip filler because the skin is stretching but when they’re massively overfilled like that it’s a direct result of the skin being stretched far too much,” she explained.

She also urges people to use aesthetics to “enhance” — rather than drastically “modify” — their features to avoid causing damage to their skin.

“I’m an aesthetic practitioner myself and if this can happen to me, just be very careful who you pick when you’re getting stuff stuck in your face,” she warned, telling people to do their homework before going somewhere.

“You don’t need to have loads of it done — it’s better to build these things up,” she continued. “It should always be within the ‘golden quarter,’ so it should be an enhancement, not a modification, which is what ended up happening to me.”