"Brazilian TV celebrity’s botched plastic surgery stirs debate on beauty" by Adriana Gomez Licon, Associated Press February 01, 2015
SAO PAULO — Andressa Urach went from being a single teenage mom nicknamed ‘‘Beanpole’’ to a reality TV bombshell in Brazil thanks to silicone implants, anabolic steroids, a nose job, and gel and botox injections, a fact she wasn’t ashamed to share with fans.
‘‘There are plenty of ugly women,’’ she said last year. ‘‘If you have the money, you can be beautiful. This pretty face you see here, my dear, it costs some.’’
More, it turns out, than she bargained for.
The 27-year-old Urach, arguably Brazil’s most outspoken advocate of advancement through cosmetic surgery, recently went into septic shock and was placed on life support after a botched operation to augment her thighs, sparking a debate on the risks Brazilian women take for beauty at a moment when the nation has surpassed the United States as the world’s plastic surgery capital.
It led Urach, the runner-up in Brazil’s ‘‘Miss Bum Bum’’ contest, to express regret ‘‘that I put that poison in my body, mostly because of having too much vanity.’’
Urach appeared on television this week for the first time since falling ill two months ago, her wounds still so fresh that blood could be seen seeping through her skirt.
Urach told Rede TV that she blamed ‘‘society, which unfortunately holds a standard of beauty in which you have to be perfect.’’ She added, ‘‘I hope that these wounds at least serve as a warning to other women.’’
Since Urach’s ordeal, several celebrities have disclosed similar procedures had sent them to the hospital. Experts and activists fear that Brazil’s culture of beauty has numbed women to the dangers and encouraged them to experiment with riskier, untested materials and methods....
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