We are carving up our bodies at an astonishing rate.
Almost a quarter of a million cosmetic procedures
were carried out in the UK last year alone.
I think our love of cosmetic surgery
really comes from tabloid newspapers
which promote the celebrity image.
But more and more of those going under the knife
are ending up with botched-up bodies.
It's not like having a haircut or going to the hairdresser.
It has lifelong implications.
Tonight, butchered breasts abroad.
All of a sudden, this stuff started leaking out of my boob.
The routine hearing op that ended in a collapsed nose.
I had no idea my nose was going to be touched.
And the horror hair transplant.
Emotionally, I was just broken.
More and more women are opting to fly abroad in search of a cut-price boob job.
In fact 43% of you said you'd travel to another country
to get cosmetic surgery if it meant saving a few quid.
I can understand why patients go abroad,
but the problem is if everything doesn't go well,
and it doesn't in every surgery,
then you can't contact your surgeon, you can't go and see him easily.
29-year-old Claire Hawker from Reading found this out the hard way.
A trip to Prague left her with ruptured implants and horrific scarring.
Mother of two, Claire, had been unhappy with her uneven breasts.
After comparing the costs of procedures both here and overseas,
in 2009 she forked out four and a half grand
and jetted off with her best friend, Hannah.
Going to Prague I was very confident and happy
about the surgery I was going to have.
We just thought everything would be fine,
so we didn't think that she'd have any complications.
But when it was time to see the surgeon, things didn't seem quite right.
He didn't really speak much English but he just said what size would you like to go?
And so I said, you know, a good couple of cup sizes bigger
and I'd like an uplift.
So he drew the lines and said, "See you in an hour."
Despite the warning bells, Claire assumed she was in safe hands
and went ahead with the procedure.
I did have doubts.
But I just wanted nice breasts at the end of this.
And I thought it'd all be fine.
But she was wrong.
I came round and I couldn't move. The pain was absolutely horrendous.
My friend Hannah said she thought I was going to die.
She was just... in a mess. It was awful.
The nurses seemed unconcerned, gave Claire some painkillers
and said she'd be fit to fly home in a couple of days.
I definitely felt something not right when we got on the aeroplane.
It was getting off, I felt something not right
with my left breast.
Despite this, once home,
Claire was keen to show off her new breasts to friends and family.
And so I got them out and they were like "Wow, they're so nice!"
Then all of a sudden this stuff started leaking out of my left side of my boob.
She pulled her top up and, um...
I'm not a surgeon but I'm 99% sure the implants were falling out.
They were green.
Just awful, heart-breaking.
I 'd never seen anything so ugly.
Claire's mum rushed her to hospital where she saw a plastic surgeon.
He had a look and he said obviously we're going to have to admit you straight away.
We need to get this implant out ASAP.
With a raging infection taking over her breasts,
both implants had to be removed in the first of what turned out to be
four operations within the space of a week.
During this time, her wounds were closed with temporary stitching.
The surgeon said you could have died from this if you'd just ignored it.
I thought she was going to lose her breasts, her identity.
Two months later, the infection in Claire's breasts was healed
but she was left physically and emotionally scarred.
My boobs looked ugly and I just thought my whole body looked ugly.
That I hated it.
Claire knows the only way forward is more surgery,
so she's travelled to London in the hope
that consultant plastic surgeon Nick Percival
can reverse the damage.
OK.
Nick carries out a thorough examination.
What we're going to be talking about is obviously the issues which you have.
That is, the loss of shape and whether we can give you some shape,
- perhaps by putting an implant back in. - OK.
Whether we can symmetrise the breasts,
that means to get them to be fairly more equal than they are now.
The left being probably about a cup size smaller than the one on the right.
And then there are the issues obviously to do with the scars,
the scars around the nipples and the scars underneath.
Her previous five operations have left Claire's breasts in a terrible state
and fixing them up doesn't come without further risks.
Because of the problems that you had with the surgery last time,
I'm going to suggest that you should consider doing these in two steps.
OK.
One operation in which we put the implants in.
We allow it to heal, settle down, we're satisfied that everything is fine
and then as a next operation, we address the issues relating to the scars.
- OK, Claire? - Thank you.
Good.
So with two more operations to add to the five that Claire's already had,
there's a lot to consider.
Coming up - a nightmare op.
Now I look at it and I think I hate that nose. I want my nose back.
Follicle failure after not one but six hair transplants.
It just looked horrendous, basically wrecked my life.
And Claire goes under the knife.
She had a much more severe infection in the left breast.
That actually destroyed some of her own breast tissue.
On the growing list of things we're having nipped and tucked,
nose jobs are still popular as the fifth most common plastic surgery of choice.
Though a relatively safe and common procedure,
rhinoplasty is actually one of the most technically challenging
forms of plastic surgery.
In our survey, only 10% of you believed having a nose job
is more risky than other surgeries.
But in the hands of the wrong surgeon, the results can be disastrous.
It's even more shocking to end up with a bungled nose job
when you didn't go in for one in the first place,
but that's what happened to 62-year-old Jennifer Snelling.
Jennifer never had a problem with her nose.
In fact, she always really liked it.
She did have a problem with her hearing. In 1998, she visited a specialist.
He explained the operation he was going to do and we went for it.
Following the operation, it was obvious something had gone horribly wrong.
Not only was she still deaf, she now had a wobbly crooked nose.
I had no idea my nose was going to be touched.
I was so excited about the possibility of maybe being able to hear again
that we just did not sort of question, "Well, what is the procedure?
What is actually going to be done?"
But the surgeon seemed unfazed.
He said to me, leave it for six months,
your hearing should slowly, slowly come back, and it didn't.
And, of course, when I rang up for another consultation, they informed me he's died
and if I needed to see another consultant, I had to pay more money.
And it was left at that.
Her situation went from bad to worse.
Over a period of time, my nose was starting to collapse off to one side.
Unable to go back to the clinic where she'd had her operation
Jennifer was given an appointment at her local NHS hospital.
An ear nose and throat surgeon from the NHS
has told me the cartilage has been removed from one side of my nose
and so, of course, my nose will collapse because there's nothing holding it up.
And they also said there would have been absolutely no way
that it could have restored any part of my hearing.
Corrective, non-essential cosmetic procedures aren't covered on the NHS,
so Jennifer has had to live with the consequences.
Now I look at it and I think I hate that nose, I just hate that nose.
I want my nose back. It was a nice nose.
And now it's just wrong and it is getting worse.
It's not just the look of her nose that's bothering Jennifer.
It's also affecting her marriage.
My snoring is so loud, it wakes me up.
Therefore I have my bedroom, he has his.
I obviously miss her. You know, when you've been married 43 years
and you find yourself in a great big bed on your own,
Everyone likes a cuddle every now and again.
It really would be nice to get her back.
Desperate to find out if anything can be done,
Jennifer is in London to see consultant cranio-facial surgeon Niall Kirkpatrick.
Just look at me, straight on, that's it.
it is a bit wobbly, isn't it?
I'm just going to have a little look inside the nose.
Well, the good news...
is that the midline partition of your nose, which is the septum,
is all intact there.
Good.
The problem really seems to be loss of support
of the strut of cartilage
that comes up that midline partition where you see this little bit here.
It looks as though that's really collapsed down
Images of Jennifer's nose are loaded into a morphing program.
So this is how you are now. This is where I think we would go to.
Niall would need to take cartilage from another part of her body
to create a more even shape.
The most common place that we would borrow that from
is either the midline partition of your nose or your ear, or your rib.
And I think you just need to think a little bit about
which one you would be most prepared to deal with.
So whilst Jennifer decides which body part she's prepared to donate,
29-year-old Claire Hawker is in London to have the first stage of her surgery
to repair damage caused by ruptured implants she'd had done in Prague.
I am a little bit nervous cos obviously what happened in Prague.
I'm just so glad they're going. They're not going to look like that anymore.
Today, cosmetic surgeon Nick Percival will attempt
to reconstruct her disfigured breasts in the first of two procedures.
With one breast larger than the other,
Nick needs to carefully map out a plan before she's prepped for surgery.
Incisions are made underneath Claire's already scarred breasts.
So the first part of this operation...
..is to create
a space to put the implant in,
and we call that the pocket,
so we've just got to go through all the scar tissue from the previous surgery.
The breast cavity is washed out with antibiotic solution
to prevent an infection forming.
Half an hour in, and Nick is ready to insert the first implant.
Confident it's in the right place,
he carefully stitches up the wound before he moves onto the right breast.
Because she had a much more severe infection in the left breast,
that actually destroyed some of her own breast tissue.
So this left breast had become smaller than the right.
I've put in a 420...
gram implant on this left breast
and I'm planning on putting something of the order
of, I think, about 360 on the other side.
Nick gets to work creating the pocket in the right breast
for the implant to be inserted into.
So this is the implant.
360 grams, this one.
420 in that side, 360 in this side.
With the different-sized implants now in place,
Nick stands back to check the symmetry
but the right side, despite having a smaller implant, still appears larger.
So we've gone for a medium profile as opposed to a high profile,
because this one was sticking up too much.
So hopefully with a slightly smaller size and a lower profile,
we'll get something which will look a little bit more symmetrical.
And to me, that looks better.
That, to me, is a better match, so good. We'll stitch that then.
An hour in, and satisfied that Claire's breasts are now even,
Nick stitches her up and part one of her procedure is over.
I think the operation went well. I mean, it's the first stage of two
because there's some further work to do. Scar revision's going to be the next part.
I mean, there is a lot of scar tissue there.
The increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery is not just limited to the ladies.
Male pattern baldness has always been a taboo topic,
especially when it happens at a young age.
But since the likes of Wayne Rooney have hit the headlines and the operating table,
it seems more and more men are happy to undergo a hair transplant.
59% of men questioned said they would consider this invasive cosmetic procedure
if they started losing their hair at a young age.
For those with a full head of hair,
balding may not seem like such a big deal,
but it can be completely debilitating,
as Michael Avola from Northampton can confirm.
He was a confident and outgoing 23-year-old martial artist
whose dreams of becoming an actor were shattered
when he started losing his hair and, along with it, his confidence.
Because it was such a young age, it was very worrying and stressful.
After trying countless hair-loss products to no avail,
Michael decided to take drastic action and found a hair clinic in London
that specialised in hair transplant operations.
They promised me a really good result.
The scarring would be almost invisible
and there would be full coverage of the front, back.
But they were wrong.
After not one but six failed operations,
Michael was left scarred, seven grand out of pocket, but worst of all, still bald.
It just looked horrendous. It was growing like, almost like wire.
Emotionally, I was just broken.
I went back and explained to them that they'd really basically wrecked my life.
His complaints fell on deaf ears and now, at the age of 49,
his confidence is still in tatters.
Every day when I leave the house, I try to wear a hat on most times if I can help it.
Yeah, I mean, you go through every emotion.
You get embarrassed, you get angry because you think,
"How could I do such a stupid thing?"
Today, Michael has come to Manchester
for an appointment with consultant hair surgeon Dr Bessam Farjo
to see if anything can be done to fix his scarred scalp.
I would have expected to see a lot more hair growing on your head
considering how many surgeries you say you've had.
-Yeah, but... - So, yeah, yeah.
With the scars from his previous six surgeries
mostly hidden beneath his natural hair,
they decide that the priority is tackling the botched transplants
on top of his head.
So we can build a hairline in front of the existing line using single hairs only
to create a feathery line, slightly lower but not too much.
You have to coordinate with what's happening now but a feathery hairline,
more natural looking and then fill as much density as we can.
perhaps as far as my fingers are concerned.
Yeah.
I think, the operations that Michael has had, certainly in my opinion,
are below par, for multiple reasons.
One, because he's had multiple scars,
when he should have had one or two scars.
Second, because there's certainly not enough hairs
growing from one operation, never mind six.
And thirdly, the hairs that are growing, the size of the grafts,
the angles and the directions are not giving him a natural appearance.
And I'm hoping we can get somewhere between -
because of the limitations of what you've got -
somewhere between 1,500 to 2,000 grafts.
And is that enough to make a difference at the front area?
I think certainly as far as this line here,
out of one operation, it'll make a difference certainly.
Remember, it's not about bringing you back to the way you used to look.
It's about making you look better the way you are now.
I'm pretty realistic about my expectations, yeah.
Good. We'll do that now then.
But will this difference be enough to restore Michael's self-esteem?
With no guarantees, he opts to go ahead with the complicated procedure.
Coming up - the aftermath of a bungled ear op.
The cartilage that's in the midline partition of the nose,
a big block of it here has been taken away.
Teen breast surgery takes a downward turn.
I'm so, not ashamed, but I feel like a freak. I just want to feel normal.
And Claire undergoes a second operation to fix her butchered breasts.
The scar has stretched considerably so I'm trying to make it not as wide as before.
With the number of cosmetic procedures on the up,
so too are the number of complications.
In West London, 62-year-old Jennifer is on her way to hospital
to have an operation to mend her collapsed nose.
In 1998, she underwent surgery to fix a hearing problem.
but when she woke up, the surgeon had left her nose disfigured.
Now I look at it and I think, I hate that nose.
I just hate that nose. I want my nose back.
Consultant cranio-facial surgeon Niall Kirkpatrick
will perform Jennifer's operation.
Secondary rhinoplasty surgery is always
much more difficult than primary rhinoplasty surgery because you don't
have all the materials that were there at the first time.
Following her consultation with Niall,
Jennifer's decided to have cartilage removed from her ear to rebuild her nose.
Once in theatre, Niall begins by injecting an anaesthetic
to help prevent excessive bleeding. He then makes his first incision.
This allows me then to take the skin off the underlying structure of the nose
and see where we're missing the support for the cartilage.
We'll be able to see all of the nasal skeleton this way.
As Niall works to free the skin of the nose from its bony scaffold,
the extent of Jennifer's previous surgery becomes evident.
Normally these wings, they're normally very well supported
by a cartilage that's in the midline partition of the nose just here
which comes up and these sit on them,
and a big block of it here has been taken away.
30 minutes into the operation, Niall has established how much cartilage
he will need and begins extracting it from behind the ear.
We want quite a long piece.
If we take too much cartilage away, the ear will go all floppy and lose its shape.
If we take a bit that's just too small...
it just won't provide any support at all,
in which case the whole purpose of it is wasted.
You always need much more than you think you're going to need.
While Jennifer is in theatre, her husband has an anxious wait.
I think I'm possibly more nervous than she is.
I'm on tenterhooks until she's back in the recovery ward.
But as soon as I can see her eyes open again,
then I'm relaxed and I'm quite happy.
After stitching up the ear, Niall begins to perform the cartilage graft.
You can see that the cartilage has a bend in it.
We're trying to straighten out the bend.
So by putting the two bits of cartilage on the opposite bend,
and stitching them together, we'll get a straight bit of cartilage.
Niall then makes a pocket for the cartilage to sit in.
So I need this to be able to rest down in there,
pushing it as low down as I can get it.
So that should give the support we want.
And once in position, he stitches it in place.
So we'll just put the skin envelope over just to see what we've achieved so far.
You can see that instead of the nose sort of wanting to slump across,
it's now straight in the midline,
and the tip, instead of being slumped down,
is now projected upwards.
What we're going to need to do is obviously do some narrowing here,
taking this bump down here.
Using an instrument similar to a carpenter's plane,
Niall works to file down the bump on the bridge of Jennifer's nose.
Now that feels nice and smooth. There's no bump.
So the next thing we want to do is to try and make the tip
just a little more refined.
We can just trim that a little bit back, take out some cartilage in this area,
just make the tip a little bit less flat and boxy.
And we'll just see what difference that's made to the tip here.
So I'm happy. We've got a nice tip projection.
We've got a nice narrow tip instead of a broad, flat one
and a good strong sense of the bridge of the nose compared to the tip.
I hope she'll be pleased.
Happy with the result, Niall adds the final stitches.
So I'm just putting a splint on the nose,
which will help reduce the swelling in the tissues.
Operation over, and Jennifer is taken back to the ward to recover.
Two weeks have passed since Jennifer's operation
and she's back to see Niall at his consulting rooms,
to see her new nose for the first time.
- Hey, there we go. Are you alright? - It's made my eyes water.
So, can you see?
So much better.
Brilliant.
Absolutely brilliant.
It looks like a nose again, not a botched-up nose.
I'm feeling absolutely great.
Really pleased to be showing my nose off.
I love the shape and the look and just absolutely over the moon with it.
I'm thrilled to bits.
And I can smell things now and I didn't realise I couldn't smell before.
Finally after 18 years living with a collapsed nose,
both Jennifer and her husband are delighted with the results.
Here's to my new nose!
The number of teens having plastic surgery has doubled in the last decade,
with cosmetic clinics reporting 100% rise in the amount of 18 and 19 year olds
wanting to increase their cup size.
In our survey, 54% of under 21s
said they believed having bigger boobs would give them
greater self-esteem and more confidence.
However, with the female body still growing until the age of around 21,
going under the knife at such a young age can result in complications,
as Gemma Midgley found out.
When I was about 18...
I was like really unhappy with my sort of chest size,
being really, really small and it was sort of taking over my life.
It was ruining my confidence.
I just felt really, really self-conscious. Always wore padded bras,
just to make it look like I had something.
So I decided to have a breast enlargement.
Following the operation, she returned to her teenage life with renewed confidence,
but that was short-lived.
As her body continued to develop,
Gemma became unhappy with where her new implants now sat on her chest,
so she opted to go under the knife again.
When I was 21, I went to go and have another operation.
The results of that one were much better, but not long after I'd had the operation,
my right side started to feel really, really tight.
Gemma was terrified she'd developed capsular contraction,
a condition that sees the scar tissue that naturally forms around the implant
thicken and harden, squeezing it out of shape.
And now I've got a lot of asymmetry between them
and a lot of rippling on the top of this one.
As a result of these two breast operations,
Gemma's been left Â£6000 out of pocket
and with misshapen breasts and uneven nipples.
I'm so... not ashamed but I feel like a freak.
I just want to feel normal.
Far from boosting her self-esteem, Gemma's confidence is now in tatters.
The issues with her breasts
have also affected her relationship with her husband.
When I first met him and we were first married, you know, that should be a time
when you should feel really comfortable with your bodies with each other.
I've never had that. I've always felt really self-conscious.
And I've got a really supportive husband.
He's always telling me he loves me just the way that I am
but he does know that I'm unhappy.
I'm scared that if my husband does see my chest,
that you know he will go off me and you know he'll leave me.
Gemma realises many of her problems arise from having breast surgery at just 18.
I feel like that at such a young age, that I should possibly have done more research
about who I went to and what I was actually having done.
I should have been advised to wait, even though I was so unhappy with my body.
At that age, my body probably was still developing and had I waited,
maybe I would have got a different result.
I just thought I'm going to wake up with these perfect breasts
and I'm going to feel so happy about myself and so self-confident,
and that just didn't happen for me.
Desperate to find a solution, Gemma has travelled to West London
to see if consultant cosmetic surgeon Paul Harris can fix her botched-up breasts.
From the front view I can see there's a difference between the breasts.
This implant's sitting higher than the left implant
and you can feel some breast tissue below this implant here.
The nipples are quite low on both sides
with the left being lower than the right on measurements.
They're sitting quite high here. They're actually not that tight
and I don't think there is a significant what's called "capsule".
I think this is much more to do with the way that they were placed
- in the first instance actually. - OK.
Just put your hands on your hips for me and push in really hard.
And relax.
And do that again for me.
Yes, so they're above the muscle. If you've got them underneath the muscle,
when you do that, you can see it all sort of tighten up.
When the muscle tightens?
What would you like to try and achieve in terms of size and position?
Do you want to be fuller at the bottom here? Or do you like this look here?
No, I like to be fuller on the bottom. My ideal is to be symmetrical.
Um... Yeah, sorry.
I'm sorry.
Do you want to take a moment?
Thank you.
It's just...
It really does affect my life and...
um, the main priority for me is just to be symmetrical really.
Paul recommends new sub-muscular implants but there are risks.
One can see some bleeding at the time of the operation in the breasts,
and if you did get a catastrophic infection of the implants,
the implant might need to come out.
We might need to leave you without an implant for two or three months.
The next time Gemma sees Paul,
he'll be attempting to repair her previous boob jobs,
hopefully, in one simple operation.
Claire is about to undergo a seventh operation on her breasts,
a final bid to fix the damage caused to her bust following surgery abroad.
It's been four months since her last surgery,
when new implants were inserted,
and only now is it safe for Nick Percival to tackle the horrific scarring.
This is just the last bit now. It's just been a roller coaster.
Hopefully, this will be the end of her four-year ordeal.
Because the skin has now stretched,
I think there's enough spare skin now to be able to remove the scars
and stitch it all up, and not run any significant risks of it not healing.
That's why we've done it with this strategy of two operations.
The scars are marked and measured, and Nick gets to work.
I'm starting on the right breast
because I've got to adjust the nipple position on the left.
And what I want to do is get this one done and fixed,
and then I'll get the nipple position
to be symmetrical with this.
The stretched scar is literally cut away from Claire's breast.
The area is cleaned and blood vessels are sealed
before she's neatly stitched back up.
And we've put two layers in, one underneath the skin,
to bring the edges together and give it some strength.
And then the second one here is just underneath the skin
and this is to... actually close the skin.
In this case, we expect...
that it should heal...
and we end up with a better scar, a much thinner scar.
Same length, same...
same location.
But not as wide as before.
So that's the right side done.
The procedure is repeated on the left side.
Next, Nick has to tackle Claire's lopsided nipple.
It's bigger than the one on the other side
and the scar has stretched considerably,
so I'm trying to make it a similar size
and, at the same time, remove the rather stretched scar,
particularly at the top of the nipple.
With the scarred area now removed, Nick stitches up around the nipple.
That's it really. We've finished the surgery.
We're going to put some dressings on.
Four years after near-fatal breast surgery in Prague,
and three weeks after the scar revision surgery,
Claire is back in London for a final assessment of her new breasts.
At the end of the day, it's come out as well as we possibly could have expected
and hoped for, so are you happy with it?
Very happy, yeah. I'm so happy with the outcome.
It's taken a further six operations,
but Claire is finally able to put her bungled foreign boob job behind her.
The moral to this story is I would caution people really
about going abroad to have operations.
For most people who are going abroad, they know nothing about the surgeon
who's going to undertake the operation and I think that's very dangerous.
So, you may think you're saving money
but you're likely to spend a lot more in the long run.
About six, seven months ago when I was looking at myself in the mirror
at my dreadful scars and to what they look like now is unbelievable
and it's just gone so smoothly and I'm so happy with the way they look now.
They look so nice. Yeah, I'm so happy.
Still ahead - Gemma goes under the knife.
If I don't get results from this one,
I really will feel like that, you know, there's nothing else that I can do really.
And it's a hair-raising moment for Michael.
The biggest problem the grafts would face is if they dry out.
If they dry out, almost definitely they would die
and they will not produce another hair.
More and more men are concerned about losing their hair.
In fact, there's been a 260% increase
in men enquiring about hair transplants in the last year.
In Manchester, 49-year-old Michael Avola is about to go under the knife
to reverse the damage of six failed hair transplant attempts.
Michael reluctantly has what's left of his thinning hair shaved off
by hair restoration surgeon Dr Bessam Farjo,
so the area of donor hair at the back of his head can be clearly visible.
Then under sedation, he is injected with anaesthetic.
It's injecting fluid that not only makes it easier to drill through the skin
but it also reduces the amount of bleeding that you can get.
That swelling you can see is very, very temporary.
It actually dissipates into the tissues quite quickly.
Holes are drilled round the shaft of each hair, right down to the roots,
allowing the follicles to be plucked one at a time, keeping them intact.
After you've made a few of these extractions or several extractions,
then the grafts get picked out either with the swab or with forceps or tweezers.
Once the hairs are safely collected,
it's essential to keep them hydrated and at a chilled temperature
so they survive before being replaced into Michael's scalp.
The biggest problem that grafts would face is if they dry out.
If they dry out, almost definitely they would die
and they will not produce another hair.
The hairs are sorted by Bessam's team under a microscope
into single, double and triple hair follicles
to be used on different areas of Michael's head.
You can probably extract 500 to 800 of these grafts per hour,
so in Michael's case we're looking at this taking approximately two hours.
Transplanted hair must come from your own head or an identical twin's,
or your body will reject it.
It should stay for life but men who undergo hair transplants
will continue to lose their natural hair as they would have anyway.
Two hours in and it's time to transplant the harvested follicles.
So the single hair grafts are best for naturalness.
But they don't give you much bulk.
So we reserve them for the front where we want to create the irregular appearance.
Then the two hairs behind them and the three and four hairs behind them,
so you create a gradual natural increase in density sort
Bessam selects the correct length blade to cut holes for the new follicles.
I'm angling the cut according to the way I want the hair to come out.
So now what I'm going to do, I'm going to irregulate the hairline a little bit.
I'm going to put a dye, a blue dye onto the skin.
That will help us see the cuts better.
One by one, the individual hairs are carefully transplanted into the holes.
It's a time-consuming process and one that requires patience.
We've got the last few grafts to place,
and these are the grafts that are of the three and four-haired variety.
They're going to go at the back.
So Michael will be pleased, not long to go now.
Five hours since the start of the operation
and Bessam is satisfied that all the grafts are in the correct place.
Michael's surgery went really well I thought today,
and we were fortunate in that he had good quality hair
above all the scars that were of concern to him.
I think for the area that he's interested in,
which is to make a difference to his hairline and front of his scalp,
I think it's going to make a significant difference.
But any difference won't be seen for some time.
Five months later, Michael is back in the chair
to see how his transplanted hair has taken.
Right, Michael, so I think things are going really well.
I'm pretty pleased with how things have developed so far.
I was expecting them to be a bit slower but really good.
Do you think you're fairly happy as well?
Yeah, I'm satisfied with the results so far. Yes, that's good.
This will continue to develop in terms of numbers,
quality, body, colour,
up to 12 to 18 months after the transplant.
I mean for me, five months later, this is quite dramatic.
Considering the number of previous surgeries
and the excessive amount of scar tissue,
Dr Farjo and Michael are pleased with the progress.
Most of all, I'm delighted to see that, you know, his scalp will grow hair.
I was a little bit worried with all the operations he's had in the past,
why hasn't he got better growth?
But now that we know he can get really good growth,
I'm pretty positive about his future.
It's been an improvement and, hopefully, will progress a bit further.
Next time, I'll see him again and I'm excited about the future.
Michael still has a long journey ahead of him.
It will take his transplanted hair up to 18 months to fully establish,
but he's already seeing the benefits.
Hoping to restore her own self-confidence is 29-year-old Gemma Midgley.
She's at hospital in Surrey for surgery on her unsymmetrical breasts.
I feel like a freak. I just want to feel normal.
- Hi, nice to see you. - Nice to see you.
She's under the care of consultant surgeon Paul Harris.
It is true that the younger you have breast augmentation done,
the more risks and complications you are likely to experience.
As she is marked up for surgery, Gemma knows that this is her last hope.
If I don't get results from this one, I really will feel like...
there's nothing else that I can do really.
So, fingers crossed.
Paul will be replacing Gemma's old implants
to give her more symmetrical-looking breasts.
There is a difference in the volume of the breasts
and I think that does add to my feeling that perhaps we might want to put in
different implants to each side, to achieve a better symmetrical result.
After making his first incision,
Paul lifts the right breast off the chest wall,
so he can reach the incorrectly placed implant.
I've already come up to here and I'm not actually at the implant yet.
One would have thought I would be into the implant,
but actually it's just breast tissue there.
OK, so you can see the implant sitting here now. I'm going to take it out.
After removing the right implant, he moves onto the left side.
So you can see on this side, we're onto the implant much quicker.
It's right here. On the other side, it was much higher up in the breast.
Just 12 minutes into the operation
and both implants have been removed,
revealing the natural differences in Gemma's breasts.
So you can see the left is empty and loose,
and the right is sitting higher, tighter.
Before placing a new implant in Gemma's right breast,
Paul closes up the pocket that was home to the implant from her original surgery.
The implant was sitting very high
and I'm going to try and close that down with some stitches.
Traditionally implants are placed on top of the pectoral muscle.
However, in this operation,
Paul believes the best option for Gemma is to cut a pocket underneath.
So here's the old pocket here and the new pocket is beneath the muscle
and this is the edge of the muscle.
So I'm making sure the edge of the muscle stays up above the new implant
by just tacking it to the roof of the old pocket.
One hour and 37 minutes into the operation,
and after a lot of trial and error,
Paul has decided on which two different size implants
to use to create a symmetrical look.
I've worked on shape rather than size
and I needed the implants to fill out the soft tissue envelope.
What I'm not that happy with is this skin is quite tight on the right-hand side.
I'm going to open this out again and try and open up this lower pocket
see if I can get that a better curvature there.
Paul removes the right implant before scoring along Gemma's breast tissue.
This will help to improve the appearance of the breast
by giving it a more natural shape.
Yes, that's better. I think it's made a difference actually with the release.
You can see now as I'm closing this.
That curvature is now more convex than it was. I hope Gemma will be happy.
Surgery over, Gemma is left to recover as the healing process begins.
Two weeks later and she's back in London to show Paul the results of the surgery.
Fantastic. They're good, they're very symmetrical actually.
- Yeah. - That's much better, isn't it?
Yeah, much better.
And you've still got the fullness in the upper part,
but it's actually come to a much better shape.
- It's not all up here now, is it? - Yeah.
- It's great. Can I have a look underneath? - Yeah, of course.
Fantastic.
Gone are Gemma's lopsided breasts and uneven nipples.
The overall shape is much better and much more symmetrical,
so the look is much better overall.
Back home, Gemma's new breasts have given her renewed confidence.
I just feel normal now. I feel like I've, you know, not got this
sort of secret to hide and try and disguise from everybody.
I don't feel like that I'm hiding from my husband any more.
It's nice to feel that I can just feel comfortable around him
and just feel normal and happy.
Yeah, it's really, really nice.
And now I can just enjoy taking my son swimming
and just feel normal like everybody else when I get changed.
So, yeah, it's really good. I'm happy.
As more and more people are going under the knife
in search of physical perfection,
an increasing number are ending up with botched-up bodies.
The only people who never have any problems
are the people who never do any surgery.