14 DAY TRIAL // Toby Sheldon, a 35-year-old man who made a career in showbiz off his desire to look like pop star Justin Bieber no matter how much plastic surgery he needed for it, has died. He’d been missing since August 18, and he was found dead in a hotel room.
Sheldon first rose to fame in 2013, when he went on the record saying he’d spent an estimated $100,000 (€88,392) on plastic surgery, both of the invasive and non-invasive kind, to get Bieber’s youthful looks. He wasn’t exactly a fan of his music, but he loved the idea of never having to grow old.
Sheldon went missing, was found dead
TMZ reports that Sheldon’s body was found in a motel in the San Fernando Valley, 3 days after he was reported missing. “Police found drugs in the room but it's unclear how he died,” the report notes.
It is believed that his disappearance followed a bitter fight with his boyfriend, according to police sources. However, during his brief brush with reality television, on plastic surgery-focused shows, he maintained he was straight, by saying that his girlfriend had once threatened to leave him if he got more work done.
Sheldon was 35 years old and he had started altering his looks in the early 2000s, when his hair started falling out. He got several hair transplants and eventually began getting work done on his face as well, saying on one episode of The Doctors that he didn’t want to look in the mirror and see himself as “ugly” because his face was showing his age.
In his short TV career, Sheldon appeared on E!’s Botched, but also on TLC’s My Strange Addiction, Inside Edition and The Doctors. He always maintained his obsession with looking like Bieber wasn’t body dysmorphia, but simply a desire to always look his best.
Unhealthy obsession with plastic surgery
Sheldon didn’t consider himself a fan of Bieber’s music and he was clearly not willing to admit that there was nothing natural about the look he’d achieved through numerous interventions, as you can see in the videos below.
He’d had his chin shaved, nose jobs, eye work and even surgery on the corner of his lips, bringing them upward when he smiled. He’d also had fillers and Botox and countless laser treatments, and he insisted he was happy with his unnatural, frozen face.
He knew he didn’t look much like the Canadian pop star, but he insisted that didn’t matter: he didn’t look his age and that was enough for him.
As the experts on The Doctors also told him, he had serious issues with body image and self-esteem. His obsession with his looks was unhealthy because it made him make rash decisions, because it pushed him to cut into himself until he wouldn’t be able to recognize himself.
According to the latest reports, his boyfriend breaking up with him was enough to send him over the edge.
