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Liu Huaming liked her face in general but was unhappy with the bridge of her nose.

So, like many young women in China, she decided to have it changed through plastic surgery. Ms Liu, a Sichuan resident, went to a beauty parlour in September last year for what should have been straightforward surgery.

She paid 1,200 yuan (HK$1,130) for the operation but noticed a couple of days later when the bandages came off that her nose looked a bit skewed.

The Chengdu Cosmetic Surgery Centre admitted the operation had not gone as planned and said the silicon the plastic surgeon had injected into Ms Liu's nose would have to come out.

After the second operation Ms Liu became feverish and vomited. Meanwhile, her nose began to turn black.

Ms Liu's is just one horror story out of thousands that are occurring in the mainland's unregulated plastic surgery industry as women go to unlicensed beauty centres and under the knife of unqualified surgeons.

Hundreds of thousands of women have damaged their looks through surgery rather than improved them, according to a government consumer watchdog publication.

There have been more than 200,000 lawsuits in the past decade in which women have sued so-called plastic surgeons and beauty centres, according to the China Quality Daily,  an official newspaper on product and service quality and consumer protection.

The cosmetic surgery industry has mushroomed in recent years. Places that offer such surgery range from hospitals that have opened specialised departments to private beauty salons that hire mostly migrant workers.

Advertisements in most cities offer services that include doubling the size of the eyelids, nose jobs, breast enlargements, face-lifts and liposuction.

Advertisements carried in newspapers, magazines and on posters boast treatments that are 'painless, scar-free and without operation'.

China now has one million beauty salons, employing six million people. They produce an annual revenue of 24 billion yuan, according to the China Quality Daily.

The Ministry of Public Health issued a circular last year to regulate the industry and stipulated only doctors trained in plastic surgery for at least five years were eligible to perform surgery. But in reality, young women from the countryside often undertake the task after a brief stint at a training school.

In December, a man surnamed Wang was given 209,000 yuan compensation in Beijing. He went blind in his right eye after a collagen whitening, anti-wrinkle treatment went wrong.



Horror stories abound as plastic surgery runs riot