Rachael Knappier’s botched lip augmentation. Image via Facebook.

A U.K woman is taking action after a last-minute decision to get lip injections nearly ended in disaster.

In August of this year, Rachael Knappier attended a Botox party at her friend’s home in Leicester, England, intending on receiving only a few injections to help erase the wrinkles in her forehead.

After a few glasses of prosecco, the 29-year-old decided to also have her lips done at a discounted rate.

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“My friend had raved about this beautician and how great she was so I decided to go ahead,” Knappier told The Sun. “The beautician – who I assumed at the time was a nurse – didn’t ask me to sign any consent forms so alarm bells should have rung. But being at a party with friends took away all the seriousness of having filler injected into my face.”

Image via Facebook.

Knappier said the beautician had noticed a bump on her lip from a teenage injury and offered to inject some filler.

“To be fair, she told me to go and have a think about it in the kitchen but she’d found my weakness,” she said. “My lip is the one thing that really bothers me about my appearance.”

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The beautician applied some numbing cream and began the injections which Knappier calls “very painful.” A few hours later, her lips began to swell and Knappier called the beautician in a panic.

Image via Facebook.

“She was visibly shocked, clamped her hands over her mouth, told me I was having an allergic reaction and that I needed to take antihistamine and get to [hospital],” she recalled. Doctors concluded Knappier wasn’t having an allergic reaction, and advised her to have her lip filler dissolved.

Once home, the pressure from the injection had caused her top lip to split open. Knappier’s mother suggested she contact The Consultant Clinic in London, a non-surgical aesthetic enhancement clinic that she had followed on social media.

Story continues

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“The owner told me I needed to get to London immediately and that she’d have an emergency doctor waiting for me,” Knappier said. “She said that, based on looking at my pictures, her medical team suspected vascular occlusion, meaning that the filler had been injected into an artery and could lead to necrosis – death of soft tissue. I honestly thought I was going to die.”





Knappier was given several doses of dissolving agent into her lips that began to reduce swelling nearly 72 hours later. Now, three months later, she says her lips are almost back to normal.

After her botched procedure, Knappier learned that her beautician had been previously released from prison months earlier, and said she is planning on taking taking legal action against the woman who she says, was not qualified to perform the procedures.

“I would never go near a Botox party again. I’m cross that I didn’t do my research and just assumed that everyone who injects Botox and fillers has been to medical school,” Knappier admitted. “I could have had the same reaction to the filler with a doctor but the difference is that they would have known what to do to treat it.”

Knappier has contacted the founder of the Safety in Beauty campaign, Antonia Mariconda, to discuss implementing regulations in the U.K. that would prohibit unlicensed medical professionals from performing cosmetic enhancements. She has also created an online petition urging the British government to implement regulations to prevent another person from receiving injections from anyone other than a licensed nurse, doctor or dentist.

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