A teen influencer has revealed how he was left with the ‘worst case of psoriasis doctors have ever seen’ after he got lip fillers injected at the age of 16.
Charlie Michael Baker, from Leyland, Lancashire, has nearly 1.5million followers on Instagram and became a best-selling author after his first book detailing his experiences of having autism hit the shelves in 2022.
The 18-year-old has now spoken exclusively to MailOnline about how he was left with psoriasis from ‘scalp to toe’ after being injected with lip filler by a woman who he says has also administered it to other celebrities.
She gave him 18 injections over a period of five months despite being underage – he was 16 and the legal age for administering fillers is 18.
When he began suffering from severe side effects which he did not know at the time was psoriasis, he says she told him it was an ‘allergic reaction to fast food’, and continued to administer fillers.
Gradually beginning as what were a few marks on his face, the teen was soon covered in painful patches all over his body.
When he eventually attended his GP clinic, he was told he had developed psoriasis.
Speaking of his ordeal, he said: ‘It was the most horrific thing ever.
A teen influencer has revealed how he was left with the ‘worst case of psoriasis doctors have ever seen’ after he got lip fillers injected at the age of 16
The teen suffered from psoriasis ‘all over his body’ from his scalp to his toes after getting filler injected at the age of 16
Charlie, now 18, shot to fame online after his book on his experiences living with autism became a best-seller
‘It completely knocked my confidence because it wasn’t just on my face. It started spreading further to my body as well.
‘It was horrible. It’s like I didn’t have any control over my body.
‘It spread to my scalp, I had it in my ears, all the way down to my toes.
‘I kept on going back to my GP and they provided me with steroid creams and stuff. It was so expensive, I spent about three to four grand on creams.
‘My skin was just peeling off. I couldn’t even wear make-up.
‘It was so red and so dry and so itchy. At points I just felt like going into the kitchen, getting a knife and just cutting the skin off.
‘I would sleep on one side and it would burn.
‘It was just the most awful thing ever.’
He joked: ‘The only thing keeping me going was that Kim Kardashian had it. I said I wanted to look like a celebrity, and I went for the biggest one unfortunately.’
He said he went into ‘hiding’ after the psoriasis spread all over his body and went from posting regularly on social media to stopping altogether.
He says that prior to the fillers there was not ‘a single spot’ on his face and had never suffered from psoriasis.
Despite being prescribed a range of steroid creams to bring the inflammation under control, they didn’t work.
The condition has largely cleared up now, nearly a year later, after he was prescribed immunosuppressants.
What started out as spots that looked like ‘chicken pox’ soon spread across his whole body and became red and scaly
The poor teen was left with the condition after getting around 18 lip filler injections over a period of five months
He says the psoriasis developed as a result of the filler. He had messaged a woman who administers filler on Instagram and the pair had agreed for it to be done for free in exchange for Charlie posting about it
Pictured: Charlie with ex-Love Islander Georgia Harrison and other friends. His success from his book saw him attending red carpets and events and make pals with influencers and celebrities
He has now been referred to a dermatology specialist and has been told he may be put on to chemotherapy tablets – showing how extreme his condition had become.
Explaining what happened, he said: ‘When my book came out, it just went crazy and now I’ve got about 1.4million followers on social media.
‘So obviously I started doing red carpets and stuff and I made a few celebrity contacts. I’d look at them and think “you’ve got a beautiful face”.
‘It’s not real, and I know it’s not real, but I want to look like that.
‘So in January last year, when I was 16, I decided to message a person that does filler on Instagram, and ask if they’d like to work together.
‘She agreed and told me she’d do my fillers for free. So she started doing my fillers, and I would just post about it.
‘My agent estimates she got about £15,000 to £20,000 worth of business from me.
‘But I started to get patches on my face. It was gradual, at first it looked kind of like chicken pox.
‘When I went to her panicking, she told me it was an allergic reaction to fast food.
‘As a skin specialist that was injecting lip fillers into my face, she tried telling me that it was a Big Mac. That a Big Mac did that to my face. So I immediately cut all contact with her.
‘I went to the GP and found out that it was psoriasis. As soon as I said I’d had lip filler the doctor’s eyes widened.
‘What he’s put it down to is that it was a chemical imbalance in the gut.
‘When the filler broke down and was passing through my gut, my gut wasn’t strong enough to withstand the chemicals in that certain type of filler.
‘It just caused massive inflammation. All my cells started attacking each other and it showed up on my face.
‘The woman should have test it on me first.’
The influencer was told by his GP that the chemicals in the filler were too strong for his gut to handle and caused inflammation, with his cells beginning to attack each other
Pictured with Georgia Harrison. At just 18, the influencer has amassed a large social media following and made celebrity friends
The teen says his skin was ‘flawless’ with not a single spot in sight before he began taking filler
Asked about the fact that it was administered to him despite him being underage, he said: ‘She shouldn’t have done it, but obviously because I’ve got a blue tick [on Instagram] she’s not going to ask me for ID.
‘I find that to be a reoccurring thing with places. I go to restaurants and stuff and as soon as they find out I’ve got a blue tick, an ID is nowhere to be seen.’
He said that the woman, who he does not wish to name, has a large number of clients, including some influencers and celebrities.
She is said to claim on her social media accounts that she is a nurse, which he feels is misleading as her qualification is that she is a mental health nurse.
Surprisingly, the ordeal hasn’t put Charlie off of getting lip filler or cosmetic procedures done altogether, in fact he still gets them done now.
But he only goes to professional plastic surgeons for it.
‘I only ever go to plastic surgeons for my lip fillers now,’ he said.
‘When I was going to the woman, I was getting lip filler about every two to three weeks. Having spoken to plastic surgeons now, she shouldn’t have been letting me do that.
‘I would message her every few weeks saying “oh it’s gone down, can I have some more?”
‘And she’s do them but she shouldn’t have done.
‘I think in the end I had about 18 injections over a span of about four or five months.’
To add to it all, he also had to deal with horrible comments online.
Images show how the psoriasis even began spreading to his scalp, all the way down to his toes. He says that the psoriasis on his toes was so bad his nailbed began separating from his nails
The condition left his entire body red and painful for months, with the teenage having to cover himself in steroid creams prescribed by doctors. He says the creams alone cost him £3-4k
‘I just hid. I hid. I did my last red carpet and then just thought I’m going to hide now.
‘If you look at my social media, I was actively posting and then I almost stopped posting altogether.
‘And obviously I had horrible comments. When I came out with psoriasis it was a picture of my face without makeup on and in the caption it said “I’ve got psoriasis”.
‘And people were horrible about it. Don’t get me wrong others were also lovely.
‘No-one online still knows to this day the reason I got the psoriasis.’
The teen influencer was previously praised for donating £200,000 to charity after he wrote a book about his experiences of being autistic.
He quickly became a bestselling author at the age of just 16 after his first book, Charlie Baker: Autism And Me was released.
In it, he revealed he had been bullied since the age of five and didn’t receive an official autism diagnosis until he was around six years old.
In his book he wrote: ‘I was bullied a lot through the end of primary school and my whole secondary school life.
Charlie also released a second book last year called ‘Social Media and I’ in which he spoke about his experiences with social media and the dangers of it
‘I was bullied for years, and that affects you a lot more thank you think.
‘People think words are just words and never think about how they could potentially impact someone.
‘You really never know what someone is going through and one comment, that might seem silly to you, could really affect them! I am really grateful and appreciative of the voice and platform that I have today!’
Charlie felt compelled to write the book to encourage more people to speak out about their autism struggles.
He has since written a e-book titled ‘Social Media and I’, detailing his experiences with social media and the dangers of social media.
He says that he gets between 300 to 500 rape and death threats daily, with some even sending him pictures of his house from Google Earth.
