A year-long investigation into the 'wild west' of unregulated cosmetic surgery

On a cold Sunday morning, I'm standing on a street corner in south London waiting for a custom blue Porsche to pull up.

I'm here to get answers for the alleged victims of a business whose practices have left people physically and mentally scarred.

This business is just one small part of a scandal I have been investigating for a year.

Eventually, Daria, a beautician from Luxury Medical Aesthetics, arrives to open up shop for one of her "training" courses.

She parks up, but after seeing me approaching with my camera crew, shuts the door of her sports car and refuses to answer my questions before speeding away up the road.

Cree-Summer Haughton approached a beautician from Luxury Medical Aesthetics outside her salon

In the months leading up to this, I had been made aware of Luxury Medical Aesthetics and allegations of dangerous practices which have left a number of customers with ongoing injuries, including leaving someone unable to urinate.

They are the leading trainers in the country for a specific cosmetic procedure - seemingly so popular that I’d even heard of reports of people flying from abroad to attend their courses.

They specialise in training for something they currently advertise as ‘Lipo Reduction," also known as liposuction surgery, which doctors have confirmed to me after watching videos sent from the course.

The trainers, Daria and Monika aren’t registered doctors and train people to do the treatment in just a couple of hours for £1,500. However, what they’re doing is not illegal.

Undercover footage from inside a one-day training course in "fat reduction" procedures at Luxury Medical Aesthetics in Clapham

Despite that, I’ve spoken to many women who have been left with serious injuries from their procedures, leaving them traumatised and often scared to speak out.

They all told me the same story time and time again - reports of an unclean treatment room with blood splattered up the skirting board, and clients left in pain.

At best you could say some of those I spoke to were totally unhappy with the results, but the reality for others was far worse.

Complications due to the surgery required many needing hospital treatments.

One of the scarier things is that the majority of the women who had been on the course or had the treatment done, did not know it was a surgery until they were in the clinic, and often not until it was actually happening to them.

The adverts they’d responded to on social media left them thinking it was just a fat-dissolving treatment, having no sense of the invasive nature of the surgery.

With that information, I thought I had enough evidence to propose for us to go undercover, there was no other way for us to film their practices.

We arranged for an undercover reporter to attend a training session one Sunday morning.

With an agreed time to pull out, and with only a few hours actually in the session, it was never clear what footage we would obtain.

When we reviewed the tapes, to say we were shocked wouldn't come close.

I showed our footage to Professor Whittaker, a consultant plastic surgeon with over twenty years of experience in medicine.

'They’re just not thinking about the patient…it disgusts me, to be honest'

One of the most surreal experiences of the whole investigation was the moment I was stood in an actual liposuction surgery, in the private Cadogan Clinic with Professor Whittaker.

He invited me down to see how it should be done in a licensed and regulated surgical theatre and the contrast was stark.

This really put into perspective just how awful it was that Luxury Medical Aesthetics was probably doing the exact procedure, at the same time in unsuitable conditions.

To reiterate, what they’re doing isn’t illegal.

This latest investigation was part of a body of work we've been looking at all year for a documentary called 'Britain's Backstreet Beauty Scandal'.

The journey began a year ago when I myself went undercover to shed light on the liquid Brazilian Bum Lift, highlighting that people with no medical training were able to teach others to do this procedure in just one day.

I attended a one-day training course at a clinic in North London and what I found was much worse than expected.

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Lousie Moller had one of these procedures, she was minutes away from death before having emergency surgery after contracting sepsis from the procedure.

A year on she is still suffering complications after a familiar story of unclean and unsafe practices.

After we broke the story we were inundated with emails, calls and social media DMs with people claiming the same thing happened to them at clinics up and down the country.

Since then we have spoken to countless victims, confronted those responsible for the procedures, and searched for answers as to how this backstreet, unregulated industry is allowed to thrive.

Before losing the election in August, the previous Conservative government had conducted a public consultation to investigate the issue of non-surgical cosmetic procedures with a commitment to looking at new regulations.

As part of our documentary, we managed to track down the new Health Secretary, Wes Streeting who we questioned about his own government’s stance.

Wes Streeting spoke to ITV News publicly about the issue for the first time and committed to taking action against those carrying out these procedures

He didn’t back away from the issue, telling us he thought it was "absolutely disgusting that there are wild west operators practising actually dangerously in cosmetic surgery and putting people's lives at risk".

He also confirmed to us that he would commit to seeing through the work the previous government initiated.

"We are carrying it through. We are working as fast as we can. We know that we need to act. We are taking this seriously. We're going as fast as we can."

Yet despite that commitment, he wouldn’t be drawn on a timeframe.

The reality is, that in the meantime the lack of regulation means no hope for those who have already suffered, and the potential for the number of those affected to grow while they wait for action.

I have spoken to many victims during my year working on the story, with all of them having different procedures, side effects and outcomes but one thing that is the same for all of them is that they want the government to change the law.

Britain’s Backstreet Surgery Scandal is available to watch on ITVX from Thursday November 14.

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