My girl is ruining her face

Worried Jean Cawthera, 55, wishes her daughter, Rosie, could see her natural beauty

JILL FOSTER

When my youngest daughter, Rosie, 27, comes to our house for dinner, I’ll look at her across the table and snap, ‘Close your mouth while you’re eating!’ But she can’t. Her lips are so ridiculously big that she can’t do it.

It breaks my heart because, to my eyes, my daughter has ruined her face and figure with her obsession with cosmetic surgery. Her breast implants are too big, and her skin is dangerously tanned after too many sunbed sessions. Now she’s talking about having a bum lift. I’m terrified that not only will she ruin her health and fall into debt, but she could die.

Gorgeous little girl

When I look back at her as a child, she was a naturally gorgeous little girl with a cheeky smile, olive skin and long dark hair.

Rosie’s always been a girly girl and loved make-up and accessories as a child. We once went to a Brownies disco and she wore a tiara – someone commented that it was like having tea with the Queen.

Some of the girls called her names for being very small and dark-skinned when she was at school. She used to cry if we went on holiday and she started to tan, because she didn’t want tobe darker. I often wonder if that’s where her lack of confidence in her appearance comes from.

But her obsession with changing her looks didn’t take off until her mid-teens, when she got hair extensions. I hated them. They were too thick, not clean, they got trapped in the hoover. My husband, Michael, 58, called them ‘dead rats’ but Rosie didn’t care.

Around 16, she started complaining she had no boobs and wanted a boob job. I did my best to talk her out of it. ‘You’re perfectly lovely as you are,’ I told her, but later she went ahead and got a boob job anyway, and they looked huge on her small frame.

We didn’t realise at the time, but she’d used £1,000 we’d given toher for her 21st birthday, which she was meant to put towards a house deposit. Her father went mad when he found out.