Beauty is pain — but not this kind.
A woman was left with second-degree burns and permanent scarring after a microneedling session gone wrong.
“I wanted to feel confident without makeup,” Melia Nielsen, 24, told Kennedy News. “Now I’m in an even worse position because I’ve got a huge scar across my face instead of just a few spots.”
The Lincolnshire-based finance worker had undergone treatment to improve her skin complexion, shelling out almost $100 on microneedling in July, a procedure that involves puncturing the skin with small needles to generate collagen.
She had already had one session of microneedling before returning for a second, which is when things went awry. The provider went over the same spot too many times, wearing away at the first few layers of skin.
“At the time she never said anything about it but I was actually bleeding,” Nielsen recalled. “She only said five or six days later over a message that she’d noticed that I was bleeding quite a bit.”
Because she was bleeding, the provider, who she didn’t name, was cleaning the area — with what she suspects was toner — that resulted in a chemical burn on the “new, raw skin.”
“At the time it was stinging quite bad and she kept asking, ‘Are you okay,’” she said. “Now I understand why she was asking that.”
While the provider assured Nielsen to just “keep an eye” on the area — which was not just red but a patch of white — she noticed that the skin “was weeping.”
“I was like ‘surely this isn’t normal,’” she said. “I was panicking the night that it happened. I washed it with water and didn’t put anything on it.”
When she raised concerns to the provider, her messages were ignored — that is, until Nielsen said she was headed to the emergency room.
“When I woke up the next morning the whole thing looked bruised. It had gone all horrible and purple,” she explained.
“It had stopped weeping but it was wet to touch. It was really, really swollen. It was pretty much the entirety of my cheek all the way up to near my eye.”
At the hospital, doctors confirmed that it was, indeed, a chemical burn. Luckily, it wasn’t infected.
“They said what should’ve happened at the time is if she thought something wasn’t right she shouldn’t have carried on doing what she was doing,” said Nielsen, who had been a loyal customer of the beauty clinic since November 2023.
“She shouldn’t have let me leave with my skin the way it was.”
Nielsen claimed that the aesthetics provider tried to blame her for the chemical burn, upsetting her with the lack of “accountability.”
“It absolutely wasn’t anything I’d done. I’d not changed anything that I used,” Nielsen said.
“All of the skincare products that I was using were what she’d recommended for me to use. I’d not had any problem at all with any of the other treatments I’d had.”
The provider attempted to offer complimentary services in return for the inconvenience rather than help pay for Nielsen’s medical treatments, which Nielsen denied.
“I was just like ‘um, it’s okay, I’m booked in with someone else who’s medically trained. I’m okay thanks,’” she said. “There was no accountability.”
Now, Nielsen regrets ever getting the treatment, saying that the ordeal made her realize she doesn’t “really need it,” despite her struggles with hormonal acne and subsequent scarring.
The microneedling scars made it difficult for her to go to work immediately after the incident, and even months later the area on her face is not the same as before.
“Even now if I rub my finger over it now it’s a completely different texture to the rest of my face. It’s never fully going away,” she said.
“The first time I put makeup on was only about a month ago. Because it’s such a sensitive area now, even wearing makeup for a day really made it flare up.”
While she’s seeing a professional to help minimize the appearance of the scar and heal it, she is swearing off “harsh” skin treatments and using her experience as a warning to others, advising patients to “look into the background” of their providers.
“The girl who did it to me did two days of training. She did a two-day training course and was allowed to put needling tools and chemicals on people’s faces,” Nielsen claimed.
“I just want people to go to somebody who might have a little bit more experience or even actually have proper thorough consultations and stuff to avoid anything like that happening.”