Warning: Graphic photos

The French woman who underwent the world’s first face transplant after being mauled by her dog has died — after more than a decade on powerful immunosuppressant drugs, it was announced Tuesday.

Isabelle Dinoire, 49, died in April “after a long illness,” according to a hospital in Amiens, northern France. It had kept her death quiet to protect her family’s privacy, Agence France-Presse reported.

In 2005, Professor Bernard Devauchelle and Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard attached a graft of the nose, lips and chin of a brain-dead donor to replace parts of her destroyed face.

Dinoire’s body had rejected the transplant last year “and she had lost part of the use of her lips,” the French Le Figaro newspaper reported.

She had developed two forms of cancer after years of taking drugs to prevent her body from rejecting the transplant.

In February 2006, three months after the dramatic operation, Dinoire appeared before the press wearing a black top and pink cardigan. The blond, blue-eyed mother of two appeared to be wearing thick makeup to disguise the scars as she spoke through her rigid lips.

“When I woke up, I tried to light a cigarette and I couldn’t understand why it didn’t stay between my lips. Then I saw the pool of blood and the dog next to me,” she said. “I went to look in the mirror and was horrified.”

But the 15-hour operation gave her a new lease on life — though one she had to adjust to with a different face staring back at her in the mirror.

“It’s not hers, it’s not mine, it’s somebody else’s,” she said in 2008. “Before the operation, I expected my new face would look like me but it turned out after the operation that it was half me and half her.”

Some 15 similar surgeries have been performed since 2005 — with the world’s first “full” face transplant taking place in Spain in 2010, when a shooting accident victim received a completely new set of features.

About a year ago, a former Mississippi firefighter underwent the most extensive facial transplant after being burned in 2001.

Patrick Hardison, a father of five, received the face of David Rodebaugh, a 26-year-old bike mechanic and artist who was killed in an accident, the Mirror reported.

“Now I’m just the average guy walking down the street,” Hardison said on the anniversary of his operation at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan.

“People, they can look at me and tell something’s happened, but they would never look at me and think that I’d had a face transplant,” the 42-year-old said.

Hardison also will be taking immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of his life.