May believed she was receiving collagen, according to her repeated public accounts. Instead, she later claimed, she was injected with cooking oil. In some interviews and secondary reports, she has referred to both cooking oil and baby oil when describing what was allegedly placed in her face.
This distinction matters.
It is tempting, especially when retelling a dramatic celebrity story, to present every circulating detail as independently established fact. But much of what is known about the exact substance used comes from May's own recollection rather than surviving clinical records that are publicly available.
The central claim, however, has remained remarkably consistent across her interviews: she says she expected a legitimate cosmetic substance and later discovered that oil had been injected instead.
What seemed like a beauty treatment was about to become a medical and emotional ordeal lasting decades.
PART TWO — THE NIGHTMARE BENEATH HER SKIN
At First, There Was No Obvious Disaster
One of the most frightening elements of May's account is that the consequences were not necessarily immediate.
There was no single cinematic moment in which everything suddenly went wrong.
Instead, according to May, the symptoms developed over time.
In an interview recalled by Infobae, she described beginning to notice problems roughly a year later. There was itching and discomfort. Then came small hardened areas beneath her skin.
She compared the lumps to hard marbles.
One appeared, then another.
The problem was no longer simply aesthetic. Something foreign was inside her tissue, and removing it would prove far more difficult than injecting it had been.
May's description is particularly significant because modern medical regulators warn that complications from inappropriate injectable substances can emerge long after the original procedure.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for example, warns that unapproved injectable silicone used for cosmetic enhancement can produce permanent injuries and that complications may appear immediately or weeks, months or even years later. The agency lists chronic pain, infection, scarring, tissue death and permanent disfigurement among possible outcomes. Migration of injected material can create even more dangerous complications.
That FDA guidance concerns injectable silicone rather than cooking oil and therefore should not be interpreted as a diagnosis of May's case. But it illustrates a broader medical principle relevant to her story: putting an inappropriate permanent substance into human tissue can create complications that are extraordinarily difficult to reverse.
The Search for a Solution
Once May's face began changing, the obvious question was how to remove the material.
Unfortunately, injection can be much easier than extraction.
May has described visiting numerous doctors in search of a solution. The hard areas beneath her skin could sometimes be removed individually, but she said each removal presented another dilemma.
Taking out a lump could leave a scar.
Leaving it could mean continuing to live with the swelling or deformity.
As she described the process, solving one problem risked creating another.
Over the years, she underwent repeated procedures intended to improve the damage. Some online accounts claim she ultimately had more than 30 corrective operations, while other reports give different totals or simply describe numerous procedures. Because reliable sources do not provide a consistent, independently documented surgical count, the precise number should be treated cautiously.
What is well documented is that the treatment continued for years.
Univision reported that in 2020 May underwent further operations and treatments with surgeon José Achar in an attempt to correct problems she attributed to the oil injections. The following year, she said she had temporarily paused further surgery.
Infobae similarly reported her saying that Achar had helped remove individual hardened areas from her face.
The process demonstrates why claims about a quick “fix” for unsafe injections can be dangerously misleading.
Once a foreign substance is dispersed through soft tissue, complete removal may be difficult without also damaging healthy structures. Reconstructive treatment can therefore become a balancing act between removing problematic material and preserving as much normal tissue as possible.