A personal injury attorney who specializes in beauty products and services is warning against the cosmetic treatment she’d never do again due to its scary and “horrific” side effect — which is a lot more common than people realize.
Whitney Ray Di Bona, owner of Beauty Justice, LLC, railed against CoolSculpting, a popular procedure that can make your body fat grow into unsightly (but noncancerous) tumors.
Appearing on the Culture Apothecary podcast with Alex Clark, Di Bona had an unequivocal answer for the the med spa industry “sham” she’d warn against.
“CoolSculpting is this machine that is supposed to freeze your fat,” she explained.
Introduced in 2010, CoolSculpting is a cryolipolysis or fat-freezing method that targets visible fat bulges in places like the stomach, thighs, arms and chin. It works by creating cold-induced apoptosis, or fat cell death, in specific areas.
If everything goes right, after several treatments, fat cells die and melt away. But sometimes, things go wrong.
“It has a horrific side effect called paradoxical adipose hyperplasia, where instead of the fat cells shrinking, they actually expand and grow into a tumor,” Di Bona said.
Those noncancerous “tumors” are made of big, hardened fat that sometimes grow in the shape of the CoolSculpting applicator. The disfigurement can develop almost immediately or up to six months after treatment and requires surgery to correct.
In 2022, supermodel Linda Evangelista came forward with her own story of paradoxical adipose hyperplasia (PAH), telling fans that they hadn’t seen her in a while because she’d gone into hiding over it.
She wrote on Instagram that she was “brutally disfigured,” saying that it “increased, not decreased, my fat cells and left me permanently deformed even after undergoing two painful, unsuccessful corrective surgeries.
“PAH has not only destroyed my livelihood, it has sent me into a cycle of deep depression, profound sadness, and the lowest depths of self-loathing. In the process, I have become a recluse,” she added.
Evangelista sued Zeltiq Aesthetics, a unit of Allergan Aesthetics, the makers of CoolSculpt, for $50 million, ultimately settling for an undisclosed amount.
She’s not the only one. The FDA had an increase in reports after Evangelista’s suit — 1,100 in 2021, more than in the previous 10 years combined. In 2022, there were 1,900 reports.
Actress Rae-Shan Barclift from East Orange, NJ, said she had a similar experience after spending $2,700 on a session for her stomach, waist and chin.
“CoolSculpting left me with something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy,” she said.
Di Bona, the beauty lawyer, admitted that she did CoolSculpting herself a decade ago and recalls how every med spa was offering it at the time — but she had no clear warning of what could go wrong.
“Nobody told me that that was a possibility, and so many people that have had that happened say the same thing, like, ‘Nobody warned me that this was a side effect, nobody told me that this could happen,’” she recalled.
What’s more, she said, the company behind CoolSculpting were “kind of fudging the numbers” on how common the side effect is. Allergan Aesthetics claimed that PAH occurred in only 0.033% of treatments, or about 1 in 3,000.
But a 2020 study said it’s “likely being underreported and misdiagnosed,” and the New York Times reported last year that the risk is much higher than CoolSculpting said, according to interviews with more than a dozen doctors.
They even cited a 2017 study in which doctors reported the side effect in 1 out of every 100 patients.
CoolSculpting’s latest warning is that rare side effects like “visible enlargement in the treated area” can happen in 1 to 10 out of 10,000 — and that’s treatments, not patients, so patients going for multiple rounds increase their risk.
Di Bona says these numbers are too high, declaring: “We’re not doing CoolSculpting.”
