L.A. socialite's cosmetic surgery gone wrong

Ah yes, the things we do for beauty. We've all heard some of the horror stories on cosmetic surgery gone bad – Michael Jackson, Joan Rivers, I could go on- but this story about an L.A. socialite really takes the cake.

A woman in her late sixties went to her doctor complaining of severe eye pain and noted that every time she forced her eyelid open, she heard a strange clicking sound. Her doctor at The Morrow Institute in Rancho Mirage, Calif., took one look at her swollen right eye and knew something was wrong.

Six and a half hours of surgery later, the socialite's doctor and his colleagues had removed countless small pieces of bone fragments from the woman's eyelid. Yes, you read that right, take a minute to process it – Bone. Growing. In. Eyelid. Those clicking sounds she heard – the pieces of bone rubbing together every time she tried to open her eye!

The doctors later found out that a few months before she came to them, she had a face-lift that made use of her own adult stem cells, a relatively new cosmetic procedure. In her case, the docs used a type of stem cell that can transform into virtually any tissue – bone cartilage or fat, among others—and injected those cells around her eyes.

The culprit here though, was that during the procedure, the docs also injected some dermal filler – which is routine for plastic surgeons – but the main component of this one was calcium hydroxylapatite, a mineral that biologists use to turn stem cells into bone. And she paid them $20,000 for that? Bottom line ladies: you're not the only one getting older, so think twice before trying that new experimental beauty treatment – it's experimental for a reason!

Check out the full story at Scientific American.