"Modern Family's" Reid Ewing is opening up about his terrifying past with plastic surgery addiction and how his body dysmorphia lead him to spend months in isolation.
In an op-ed, Ewing, who plays Haley's (Sarah Hyland) on-again-off-again boyfriend Dylan on the ABC sitcom, admits that he got cheek implants shortly after he moved to Los Angeles in 2008 because he wanted to look like Brad Pitt.
"I woke up screaming my head off from the pain, with tears streaming down my face," he writes. After the surgery, Ewing was forced to wear a face mask and spent weeks in a hotel room taking painkillers so no one could see him. Even when the bandages were removed and the swelling came down, Ewing reveals that he still didn't look like the movie star he wanted to be.
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Instead, the implants made the bottom of his face look sunken in and many of his family members questioned if he was sick. He was - just not in the way that they thought. To fix it, Ewing began a slippery slope of surgeries to try and repair the damage, but none of them could deliver the picture of himself he had in his head.
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"Each procedure would cause a new problem that I would have to fix with another procedure," he says. "Anyone who has had a run-in with bad cosmetic surgery knows this is true."
It took four years for Ewing to finally say no to more surgeries.
"I vowed I would never get cosmetic surgery again even though I was still deeply insecure about my looks. It took me about six months before I was comfortable with people even looking at me," he writes.
The blog goes on to say that none of the doctors he visited asked him about his mental health, his history with eating disorders or a pattern of obsessive-compulsive disorder in his family.
He warns others that are considering getting surgery to fix their appearance to really question whether it really is a physical flaw or a symptom of low self-esteem.
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"Before seeking to change your face, you should question whether it is your mind that needs fixing," he says. "It's a horrible hobby, and it will eat away at you until you have lost all self-esteem and joy. I wish I could go back and undo all the surgeries. Now I can see that I was fine to begin with and didn't need the surgeries after all."
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