Woman Spends £40,000 on 15 Surgical Interventions: I’m Still Not Beautiful

As more and more studies underline the need for proper counseling both before and after cosmetic surgery, Laura Pillarella is speaking out on the issue. She should know what she’s saying: she spent a fortune on altering her looks, and she’s still not happy about her face.

In her book “Chasing Beauty: My Cosmetic Surgery Takeover,” Pillarella details her never-ending quest for bodily perfection, which she never found because the issues that needed addressing were more than skin deep.

She, like millions of other women who go under the knife, imagined her life would suddenly improved after she came out of surgery on her face. For a while, it did but the euphoria didn’t last that long.

“When the bandages came off, I was disappointed. I wasn’t beautiful – just different. It wasn’t enough,” she writes in her book, as cited by the Daily Mail.

So she kept going, she kept having more and more cosmetic surgery. 15 interventions and £40,000 later, she still wasn’t happy about how she looked – so she decided she’d take her own life.

“I had my suicide all worked out. I was going to rent a room in a hotel, get some sleeping tablets and wash them down with red wine,” she writes.

“I wasn’t going to leave a suicide note. People would know why I’d killed myself. One look at my face said it all – I’d made myself look ­hideously ugly. My face was lopsided, my nose was too skinny, my lips were distorted and my chin was crooked,” she explains.

Before she got a chance to carry her plan through, something happened to tell her that this was not solution: her brother asked her to speak at his wedding, and she suddenly realized that she did matter and, most importantly, that her problems were deeply rooted within her.

“I was manipulating my face to build a new self. I was distant from my dad and lacked emotional security so I was trying to boost my self-esteem. But plastic surgery never worked and each operation strengthened my quest to fix myself,” she writes.

If she were offered the chance to do it all over again knowing what she knows now, to turn back time, Pillarella is positive she would never go under the knife – not once.

“If I had my time again, I wouldn’t have surgery. I’d have therapy,” she says.