Woman left with second-degree burns, scars after routine beauty procedure: ‘I wanted to feel safe’

Beauty is pain – but not this kind.

A woman was left with second-degree burns and permanent scarring after a microneedling session went wrong.

“I wanted to feel confident without makeup,” Melia Nielsen, 24, told Kennedy News. “Now I’m in an even worse position because I have a big scar on my face instead of a few spots.”

The Lincolnshire-based finance worker had undergone treatment to improve her skin tone, spending almost $100 on microneedling in July, a procedure that involves piercing the skin with tiny needles to generate collagen.

She had already done a microneedling session before going back for a second, which is when things went wrong. The provider went to the same place many times, getting tired of the first layers of skin.

“At the time she never said anything about it, but I was actually bleeding,” Nielsen recalled. “She said only five or six days later in a message that she had noticed that I was bleeding very little.”

Because she was bleeding, the provider, whom she did not name, was cleaning the area — with what she suspects was toner — which resulted in a chemical burn to the “young, raw skin.”

“It was stinging really bad at the time and she kept asking, ‘Are you okay,'” she said. “Now I understand why she was asking for this.”

While the provider assured Nielsen to just “keep an eye” on the area — which wasn’t just red, but a white patch — she noticed the skin was “weeping.”

“I was like ‘surely this isn’t normal,'” she said. “I was in a panic the night it happened. I washed it with water and didn’t put anything on it.”

When she raised concerns with 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 horrible and purple,” she explained.

“She had stopped crying but was wet to the touch. It was really, really swell. It was pretty much the entirety of my face up to near my eye.”

At the hospital, doctors confirmed that it was indeed a chemical burn. Fortunately, it was not infected.

“They said what should have happened at the time was if she thought something was wrong, she shouldn’t have continued 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 get away with my skin the way it was.”

Nielsen claimed the esthetician tried to blame her for the chemical burn, upsetting her with a lack of “responsibility.”

“It was absolutely nothing I had done. I haven’t changed anything from what I used,” said Nielsen.

“All the skin care products I used were the ones she recommended I use. I would have had no problem with any of the other treatments I had had.”

The provider tried to offer free services in exchange for the inconvenience rather than help pay for Nielsen’s medical treatments, which Nielsen denied.

“I was like, ‘um, it’s OK, I’m booked with someone else who’s medically trained. I’m fine thanks,'” she said. “There was no accountability.”

Now, Nielsen regrets ever getting the treatment, saying the ordeal made her realize she doesn’t “really need it,” despite her struggle with hormonal acne and subsequent scarring.

The microneedle wounds 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, it’s now a completely different texture to the rest of my face. It will never go away completely,” she said.

“The first time I put on makeup was only about a month ago. Because it’s such a sensitive area now, even wearing makeup for a day made it really flare up.”

While she’s seeing a professional to help minimize the appearance of the scar and heal it, she’s 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 tools and chemicals on people’s faces,” Nielsen claimed.

“I just want people to go to somebody who might have a little more experience or even have proper consultations and things to avoid something like this.”