She isn’t monkeying around.
A mother of two claimed her lips looked like a “baboon’s bum” after she apparently suffered from an allergic reaction due to lip fillers. Lauren Evens’ lips swelled up to six times their normal size, landing her in the hospital.
UK resident Evens went to get her filler re-done last week, but an hour later, the horrific allergic reaction set in.
“My lips looked like a baboon’s bum,” Evens, of Chester, Cheshire, told Kennedy News and Media. “They went around six times bigger than their normal size. It was very painful.”
To her horror, she went into anaphylactic shock, with her neck swelling and airways beginning to close. The 29-year-old said the doctors gave her antihistamines to stop the reaction.
“They basically rushed me into resus and injected me with adrenaline and that worked,” she continued. “My lips were really sore and I felt a bit sick. At first, I was fine in A&E. I couldn’t close my mouth and was struggling to talk quite a bit, but then the nurses rushed me through to resus and I couldn’t really talk at all.”
While Evens had received filler for the past four years, she never had a reaction like this before. The beauty therapist trainee posted now-viral videos to TikTok to tell her terrifying tale, raising awareness for allergic reactions that can suddenly develop.
“I had the lip cream on and she [beautician] did them and they were fine, but about an hour later they started to swell up and they went huge,” she recalled. Four hours later, the reaction began.
In one clip, she showed the process of getting her lip filler done, starting from when the numbing cream was applied to when she was admitted to the hospital, warning viewers about unknown allergies.
One video, which amassed over 16,000 views, even showed Evens in the hospital.
“It was scary,” she said. “They didn’t really say a lot to me and just rushed me straight through to resus and when you think of resus and watch TV programs, that’s where you get rushed to when it’s life-threatening and I was like, ‘But I was walking, I’m fine. How am I like this and being rushed into this place?’”
Despite arriving at the hospital around 10:30 p.m., she wasn’t discharged until the following afternoon, complete with antihistamines to take at home. The swelling, she recalled, didn’t subside until three days later, and she was stuck with the pain for five.
“I’ve had a lot of lip filler and treatments before and had it previously around four weeks ago and didn’t have a reaction,” she said. “It’s unexplained as to why this happened. Apparently, at any age and at any point you can develop an allergy to something.”
“I get lip fillers for a confidence boost,” she continued. “I wouldn’t tell people not to get them done if they want to get them done, but I’d say be careful and it’s more the fact that an allergy can come on at any time.”
She isn’t sure if the problem was the actual filler or the numbing cream she used, but Evens is definitely nixing future fillers, at least for now.
“I won’t be getting lip filler again anytime soon,” she said. “I want to have the allergy test to see exactly what I’m allergic to; the thought that it could happen again is very scary.”