Pete Burns’ Plastic Surgery Addiction
The flamboyant singer of the 80s band Dead or Alive, Pete Burns has famously undergone countless bouts of plastic surgery. The results of continuous cosmetic alterations, have left the star with a bizarre facial appearance but the singer refuses to stop. In particular a lip enhancement in 2007, which was botched has left Burns’ with massively oversized lips and resulted in a massive lawsuit against the surgeon.
Famous for the song “You Spin Me Around (Like a Record)” Burns’ has a cyclical attitude to cosmetic surgery, getting regular chemical peels and botox. His general attitude toward cosmetic surgery is that it is like redecorating your home or getting a new sofa you do it every few years. The stars fascination with cosmetic surgery, began with his first nose job during the early 1980s. As his band became successful and money rolled in the star became more obsessed with reinventing his face.
On why his botched nose job didn’t stop him
Sometimes you’re just unlucky and it was fixed. If it goes wrong and you can fix it, I don’t see why it’s any big drama.
On why he continues to get plastic surgery & injections
I see it as an artform. I see myself as my own clay, and I was remodeling it.
On when the silicone in his lips got infected
I developed rashes around the mouth, then I developed lumps. [The plastic surgeon] just kept injecting me [with steroids]
My lip was at least 18 inches away from my face, the lower lip… When you wake up and your adam’s apple has come out… further than your jaw and one side of your face is so swollen you can’t open your eye and there’s yellow discharge, not just leaking squirting with a hiss it would squirt from my face. It was like one of the worse science fiction or horror movies you could ever see.
I went as far as LA and NY to see specialists and all they could recommend was amputation…
Narrator: eventually [Pete’s] lips were saved by an Italian surgeon who specializes in rebuilding faces eaten away by cancer. Burns endured two years of intensive treatment.
On fixing the botched lip implants
It was removing what amounted to pints of fluid that my body produced trying to fight this substance that was in me. I had 11 kidney stones, near liver failure, thrombosis, nearly lost sight in one eye, I couldn’t eat food.. so for two years like that.
