Linda Evangelista destroyed their career practically overnight
Linda Evangelista reveals why she has been missing: she suffers from a deep depression after an aesthetic treatment
The famous model of the nineties assures that she has developed a disease due to liposculpture and that she can no longer earn a living as a mannequin, for which she has lived the last five years "like a hermit"
Linda Evangelista has not stepped on a red carpet for seven years. The last portraits of her posing of her date from a perfume party in New York in June 2015. The paparazzi have hunted her on only one subsequent occasion: in September 2017, she also in New York. There are no more: no galas or parties, not even weddings or funerals. And it draws attention, because the 56-year-old model was one of the greatest exponents in the nineties, along with Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington or Elle McPherson, of the concept of top model, and all those women of her generation are still working today and with great media exposure. Evangelista walked the runway for the biggest, posed for top photographers, and graced the covers of hundreds of fashion magazines. But she disappeared a few years ago.
Until now. The Canadian has openly told in a long text on her Instagram profile, where she has more than 900,000 followers, that it has been a problem with an aesthetic treatment that has separated her from public life, by, according to her, "leaving her completely deformed" and, also according to her version, disqualified from continuing to practice her profession. “Today I take a big step correcting a damage that I have suffered and that I have been keeping to myself for five years,” Evangelista starts in her letter. “To all my followers, who have wondered why I haven't worked while my colleagues' careers have been on the upswing, the reason is that I was brutally disfigured by Zeltiq's CoolSculpting procedure, which did the opposite of what was promised. It increased, not decreased, my fat cells and permanently deformed me, even after going through two very painful corrective surgeries with no success. They have left me, as the press has described, "unrecognizable," says the model, referring to a treatment frequently used in many beauty centers and that is designed to extract fat, in a similar way to liposuction, but without surgery. invasive
The device makes use of cryolipolysis, that is, it uses temperatures below zero and applies it to fat cells to eliminate them, both on the body and in areas of the face such as the neck. You have to do several sessions and its effects are usually seen in a couple of weeks, according to Dr. Paula Rosso, a specialist in Aesthetic Medicine at the Lajo Plaza medical center in Madrid. “It is an expensive treatment, the price of the session can exceed one thousand euros and several are needed. The price of one of these machines can exceed 100,000 euros”.
The mannequin affirms that this procedure has caused an illness. “I have developed paradoxical adipose hyperplasia, or PAH, a risk that I was not warned about before undergoing the procedure,” she says. This condition can develop after cryolipolysis. In fact, in 2018 the official journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons warned that this could be a "rare" complication after treatment, and that in this case there would be "a painless, enlarged, firm and well-defined mass". Although the manufacturer estimated that this hyperplasia would only occur in 1 out of every 4,000 treatments, according to US surgeons it would occur in 0.72% of cases, in approximately 1 out of every 138 sessions. Although it was then stated that the disease could be treated with liposuction or perhaps with a tummy tuck months after treatment, it seems that it has not worked for Evangelista.
"The PAH has not only destroyed my way of earning a living, but has also made me fall into a wheel of deep depression, deep sadness and the lowest depths of self-hatred," Evangelista has now assured. “In the process, I have become a hermit. With this lawsuit, I step forward to free myself from shame, and to make my story public. I am so tired of living this way. I would love to walk out the door with my head held high, even though I don't look like myself anymore."
Dr. Mar Mira, co-director of the Mira+Cueto clinic in Madrid, explains that this technique "requires an individual response from the patient", and that "not everyone has the same results, nor the same in the same area", and points out in addition that "the application technique is very important, as well as the mapping of the areas to be treated", and that therefore all of this "influences a good or a bad result". "All this is a cocktail of variables that if not well controlled can lead to a bad result," she says.
