I was addicted to booty boosting injections

A petite young woman with a tiny 23-inch waist became so addicted to bum-boosting injections that she ended up with a 45-inch bottom.

Mum-of-two Vanity Wonder was so swept up in the craze for “booty­licious” curves like stars ­Beyonce and Kim Kardashian, she spent £10,000 on dangerous and illegal silicone jabs.

The former waitress, who is just 4ft 11ins tall, had so many treatments that her bottom­ballooned. At one point she caught a potentially fatal ­infection and she was in such pain that she couldn’t sit down.

Vanity, 30, now has to buy Size XL bottoms even though she’s still tiny on top. She reveals how she was ­addicted to the £325-a-time ­injections for five years before finally coming to her senses. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she says.?“I was young??and ­stupid.”

Vanity, whose addiction began in 2006 while working as a dancer at a nightclub in America, has now written a book, Shot Girls, about her ­experiences.
She says:“One of the dancers told me about them. At first I thought it sounded crazy, then one of my friends had the injections and I just thought, ‘I may as well try it’. I never gave thought to the ­consequences.”

The injections are banned in America and the UK. In fact it was a similar sort of­silicone jab which killed British ­student Claudia Aderotimi last year.

Claudia, 20, from Hackney, had flown to Philadelphia with a friend for the ­illegal injections ­after meeting an ­unlicensed practitioner in an online chat room.

Using silicone gel as a filler is only legal when it is sealed within an implant because it can be toxic to the body if it isn’t.

The silicone used by back-street practitioners is also an industrial variety which can be even more toxic and dangerous. In Vanity’s case, a friend put her in touch with the woman who gave her the injections.

“I arranged to meet her in a hotel,” she says. “When I arrived, she just told me to lie face down on the bed and pull my pants down. “I was nervous and didn’t know what to expect. I had nine ­injections in each cheek and the pain was ­excruciating.” But she was disappointed with the results, and five months later she went back for ­another round of injections. In 2007, she went back yet again.

She says of her bottom: “It was getting a lot bigger and rounder by now and people had started to notice. I liked the attention at first.” Mum-of-two Vanity, from the Mid-West of America, became ­obsessed with her growing backside. “I was addicted – from the pain of having the needle put into my skin to how it looked afterwards.”

But after her next treatment she developed an infection. “I had a ­terrible fever,” she says. “My backside felt like it was on fire.” Vanity went to her ­doctor but she was too frightened to confess to the illegal injections, so kept quiet. The doctor was baffled but prescribed ­antibiotics.

Vanity says:“A doctor friend said it could have been cellulitis, which can kill if it is not treated. “It was quite frightening and I ­realised for the first time that I was putting my life at risk.” She recovered but was left with lumpiness in both buttocks, so she had 10 more rounds of injections. “I had no choice but to keep on going,” she says. “I couldn’t leave my buttocks all lumpy like that.”

Once her behind had been smoothed out, she finally stopped the ­injections. But she will now have to live with the fact that her bottom measures 45inches around its widest part. She says: “It does affect me looking like this. I get made fun of in the street, but all I care about now is looking after my two sons.” Sunday Mirror