14 DAY TRIAL // Andressa Urach was one of the finalists on the 2012 edition of Brazil’s Miss Bumbum pageant, which ranks local beauties and determines a winner based on her curves alone, as the name of the competition also suggests. She moved into television work afterwards, but the need to always look her best made her turn to plastic surgery.
Late last year, Urach had such a close brush with death because of her previous surgical interventions that she’s convinced now she was dead for a brief second, during which time she met her maker and got to beg for another chance at life.
Fillers rot tissue inside her thigh
Urach, like many other girls that enter the competition on a yearly basis, got plastic surgery on her butt and thighs, but the most common procedures also include breast augmentation, lipo and face work.
In her case, the fillers she had injected in her thigh, hydrogel and PMMA, started rotting the tissue under the skin, a risk she was warned she was running from the start. Andressa paid no mind to it, thinking, as she reveals in a new interview for the Daily Mail, that she’d cross that bridge if she ever got to it.
In late 2014, she was told she had to have the fillers removed because of the damage to the tissue already done. A massive infection was triggered, which sent her into septic shock and organ failure, and left her with huge gaping holes in her legs.
Today, Urach is in recovery at her mother’s home and she says she wants to speak out, that she made her story and shocking photos public because she wants to help other women understand that whatever their idea of beauty is, the risk is simply not worth it.
God’s punishment
Urach is convinced she died when she went into organ failure, and she recalls seeing God and begging Him for another chance, a chance that would help her fix some of the mistakes she’d made.
“All this I'm going through is punishment for my stupid vanity,” she says. “I'm ashamed of the holes in my legs, the scars that will be there for the rest of my life. But they are also a trophy that I got through this alive.”
“Now, thanks to God, I'm able to tell other women that vanity isn't everything. If all this serves as an example to warn others of the dangers of these things, to save other women from a premature death, then that was the reason I had to go through it,” she continues.
Urach was so obsessed with looking good and commanding attention, and so focused on making the most of life (from a material point of view) off her looks that she never once stopped to consider that what she was doing was wrong.
The former glamor girl says she was shopping for surgeons like she would at the supermarket, that she also wanted to have a rib and a toe removed, in a bid to look “perfect.”
“Even when the hydrogel started causing me problems and I began to have it removed, I was there on the surgery table planning the next procedure I wanted,” she explains.
Urach chalks her problems up to a full-blown addiction to plastic surgery and calls her near-death experience the wakeup call she needed so badly. Luckily, no other woman would ever have to go through the same, as long as they pay attention to her cautionary tale.