Getting rid of unwanted facial hair is a chore for many of us—so imagine how Crystal must feel.
The Southern California resident, new mom and eager plastic surgery patient had been dealing with the hairy consequences of a 20-year-old skin graft since early childhood when she approached Drs. Paul Nassif and Terry Dubrow during tonight’s new Botched episode. After a gnarly dog bite left her with an enormous laceration along one cheek, Crystal underwent several surgical procedures, the last of which involved patching up her facial wound with groin tissue.
Soon after the surgery, Crystal noticed several oddities beginning to take shape in and around the newly-positioned piece of skin. “The patch on my face may look like a heart, but I’ve got no love for it,” she told the Botched cameras, explaining that the discolored area started sprouting hairs that refused to disappear no matter how many cosmetic remedies she tried.
“It’s genital hair,” she sighed, before presenting her situation to Drs. Nassif and Dubrow for the first time. After a lifetime with her peculiar skin graft, the birth of Crystal’s daughter Sana—who was six months old by the time her mom met with the Botched doctors—finally prompted her to seek out a corrective operation.
“If we can make [the patch] as small and as minimal as possible, that would be perfect,” she said, but the surgical fix was significantly more complicated than it seemed. In order to remove the initial skin graft and close the remaining gap, Nassif would need to insert a tissue expander underneath the skin along Crystal’s jawline during her initial surgery (another surgery to remove the expander and hopefully seal the gash for good would come later).
“That will give us more elasticity of the skin,” Nassif noted. “So, when we take out the expander, we can cut out the skin graft and then move that extra tissue into the defect and close it.” And all this without accidentally re-positioning “critical anatomic structures” like the lower eyelid, upper lip, etc.
Thankfully, Crystal’s first surgery went smoothly. But when Dr. Nassif opted to perform the second a few weeks earlier than originally planned, he ran into some trouble on the table.
“[The skin is] tight, which means that the expander could probably have gone up a little bit more,” observed the specialist. “Ah, s–t. We’re gonna have to make an incision around the smile line to get this tissue up and elevated.”
Nassif kept the additional intervention to a minimum, and Crystal was gone from the OR in no time. At 13 weeks post-op, she and her daughter were back to their old life with new hope for the future.
“Before, I was way too self-conscious,” Crystal recalled. “And now, I’m no longer worried about Sana having to go through 21 questions about what’s on my face. I’m excited, I feel beautiful…it’s like a closed chapter.”
Watch Crystal tell her story in the clip above!
Watch a brand new episode of Botched Monday at 9 p.m., only on E!