Woman shares confronting photos after cosmetic facial fillers left her disfigured.

In 2009, after many years dabbling in botox, 54-year-old Carol Bryan decided it was time to go deeper, and made the call to have fillers in her face.

What proceeded that fairly ordinary decision were years of painful regret: the surgery itself left her faced disfigured and caused one of her eyes to go blind.

She had been injected with two different fillers, combined in one syringe, in an area of her face she shouldn’t have been.

In the immediate months after the surgery, Bryan told The Independent she felt nothing out of the ordinary was happening, saying she was experiencing what she thought were “typical side effects” of cosmetic surgery.

“But three months after the procedure, I was terrified of what I looked like,” she told the publication.

She said the effects were so bad, she could not even bare to look at herself in the mirror.

“My face began to swell and contract to the point where, not only did I have to hide from my family and friends, I actually hid from myself, never looking in the mirror," she said.

“I felt like I had the head of an alien, my forehead so heavy that it fell and covered my eyes so that I could not see unless I taped or held up my forehead."

More recently, Bryan appeared on US television show The Doctors to speak about her experience.

On the program, Dr. Andrew Orden, one of the doctors on the show, addressed the criticism Bryan likely faced about why she decided to touch her face in the first place.

"You're going in for what you felt was a simple injection," he said. "What can that hurt? You trusted the doctor, you trusted what this doctor was injecting into your face."

Just weeks ago, Mamamia founder and creative director Mia Freedman wrote about the prevalence of cosmetic procedures in Hollywood:

"I just want to see other women my age looking, you know, my age — not 32, which is the age everyone in Hollywood somehow looks, whether they're 22 or 54. Botox and fillers make young women look older but they have them anyway, for reasons I can't hope to understand but with which I always try to empathise. A world in which your worth is indexed so brutally against your face and your weight must be impossibly difficult.

"And when I look at the taut, puffy faces of the women on the carpet and their tiny, tiny bodies, I see fear behind their eyes and it's reflected and refracted in mine. Because is that what I will have to do? To stay relevant? To be seen to be attractive or even just acceptable as a woman?"

As these anti-ageing "treatments" become more popular, we need to remember - they also come with a risk.

In Carol Bryan's case - after working closely with another cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Reza Jarrahy - surgery was able to fix her "disfigured" face, giving her a "new and worthy calling".

Now, the 54-year-old leads the Saving face initiative, directing the Face2Face Healing organisation which raises awareness of disfigurements.