A 24-year-old French student took his own life after undergoing a botched beard transplant in Turkey carried out by an estate agent posing as a plastic surgeon.
Mathieu Vigier Latour travelled to Istanbul in March for the transplant, which cost him just €1,300 (£1,082) – 5x less than the procedure costs in France.
The student, who was studying at a business school, went ahead with the procedure after seeing the clinic carried the stamp of approval from the Turkish ministry of health, his grieving father Jacques told French media.
Unfortunately, the procedure turned out to be a complete disaster.
During the operation, in which 4,000 grafts were removed from the back of Mathieu’s head and transferred to his face, the clinician managed to lose around 1,000 of the grafts.
This caused Mathieu’s beard to grow in an irregular, patchy fashion with hairs sprouting at unnatural angles across his face, which understandably devastated the poor lad.
His dad told BFM TV: ‘When it started to grow out, it looked like a hedgehog, it was unmanageable.
‘He was suffering, he wasn’t doing well. He was in pain, suffered from burns, and he couldn’t sleep.’
Mathieu later researched the surgeon and found he was not a qualified surgeon at all – he was actually an estate agent posing as a medical professional. WTF?
Mathieu’s family found a specialist in Belgium that attempted to correct the botched procedure, but the specialist concluded that the part of Mathieu’s scalp where grafts were removed would never recover.
As a result, Mathieu fell into a deep depression and suffered from a severe body dysmorphic disorder; a mental health condition which causes people to obsess about inadequecies in their appearance.
Three months after the initial operation, Mathieu took his own life at his student accommodation in Paris, the Telegraph reports.
Just such an unbelievably sad story and a stark reminder that body image issues can weigh heavily on people’s mental health, sometimes leading to tragic choices. For someone who already has an insecurity around a certain part of their body to then have to deal with a botched and irreparable procedure is absolutely brutal.
I wonder if the estate agent/fake surgeon who carried out the procedure will face any consequences? Surely you can’t lie about being a medical professional and then gruesomely mutilate someone and get away with it, right?
Mathieu’s dad is now campaigning to improve awareness about the risks of seemingly inexpensive health tourism.
For the OnlyFans model who was left with ‘dying nipples’ after her £2,800 boob job in Turkey went wrong, click HERE.
