'Modern Family' star reveals plastic surgery addiction

Andrea Mandell | USA TODAY

Hollywood became a scary place for one young Modern Family star.

Reid Ewing, 27, who plays Dylan on the hit ABC sitcom, recently penned an eye-opening essay for the Huffington Post revealing his struggles with plastic surgery addiction and body dysmorphia.

The actor says in 2008, after he moved to Hollywood at the age of 19, he quickly went under the knife.

"Body dysmorphic disorder is a mental illness in which a person obsesses over the way he or she looks. In my case, my looks were the only thing that mattered to me," he writes. "I had just moved to L.A. to become an actor and had very few, if any, friends. I'd sit alone in my apartment and take pictures of myself from every angle, analyzing every feature."

Ewing made an appointment with a plastic surgeon. "I genuinely believed if I had one procedure I would suddenly look like Brad Pitt," he says.

The surgeon recommended large cheek implants and Ewing signed up. After the surgery, he says, "I woke up screaming my head off from pain, with tears streaming down my face." Later, the results horrified him. "The lower half of my cheeks were as hollow as a corpse's," he says.

Ewing sought out another doctor who "was even less qualified" to fix his problem, and was advised to get a chin implant. The doctor operated the same day.

Post-surgery, Ewing says the results were worse: "I noticed I could move the chin implant under my skin, easily moving it from one side of my face to another. I rushed back to the surgeon, and acknowledging he had made a mistake, he operated on me again."

Over the next several years, Ewing continued to scrounge money together for more procedures, also trying injectable fillers and fat transfers. Each caused new problems. Meanwhile, he says, none of the plastic surgeons utilized mental health screenings.

Today, Ewing is attending college in Utah. "I wish I could go back and undo all the surgeries," he says. "Now I can see that I was fine to begin with and didn't need the surgeries after all."