Throughout the day, smartly dressed women were escorted one at a time into a terraced house.
The previous evening, each had received a text telling them to park several doors away from a £400,000 Manchester family home, just five minutes from a fashionable canal-side development. They were then instructed to wait for someone to collect them and lead them to the property.
After spending roughly an hour inside, the visitors emerged in sunglasses. But the eyewear did little to conceal the stark, uneven stitching across their faces.
Inside the house, they are believed to have handed over £850 in cash to a woman named Luyen Vu, who has no known medical training, to remove part of their eyelids.
Known as a blepharoplasty, the operation has become a sought-after cosmetic treatment for many women. Established clinics and hospitals offer the surgery to address hooded or drooping eyelids and eye bags, with prices beginning at more than £2,000.
The procedure involves removing excess skin, muscle or fat from around the eye area in an effort to create a younger-looking appearance.
However, demand for the surgery has also driven a flourishing trade in cut-price, backstreet cosmetic operations, in what campaigners describe as a “revolving door of butchery”.
An unusual legal loophole means unregulated practitioners can carry out such procedures lawfully, provided they do not falsely present themselves as registered doctors or medical professionals.
Vu, shown in a Channel 5 documentary, appears to operate under a loophole allowing unregulated practitioners to carry out procedures as long as they do not falsely claim to be registered doctors.
Luyen Vu operated from these premises in Manchester, carrying out blepharoplasty procedures on women despite having no known medical training.
A woman in sunglasses emerges from house with ragged stitches next to her eyebrows
Twenty years ago there were very few of these rogue clinicians. But a Daily Mail investigation has found that, thanks to lax legislation and a growing obsession with cosmetic enhancement, cowboy surgeons are now operating in residential roads and high streets across Britain.
Safety campaigners describe a wild west of thousands of people offering any number of different procedures online with ghost businesses and fake store fronts – practitioners who are botching patients beyond recognition.
One expert warned that for every legitimate practitioner there are four unregulated operators carrying out surgery that risks the safety and even lives of their ‘patients’. And when things go wrong it is usually left to the NHS to try to rectify the problems – leaving taxpayers footing the hefty bill for the scandal.
Our investigation comes after experts warned MPs that hundreds of women have required ‘extensive’ corrective surgery or ongoing care following complications from unregulated cosmetic procedures which they described as ‘like something out of a horror film’.
Luyen Vu is the queen of these new scalpel sharks. Using the nicknames Miss Cindy and the Bleph Lady, she advertises ‘professional cosmetic surgery’ in a ‘clinical setting under sterile conditions’ and promises ‘full aftercare’ including antibiotics.
Her ‘surgical price list’ offers a range of procedures, including ‘upper facelift’ for £1,400 and ‘lower facelift’ for £1,800, as well as different types of ‘blephs’ for £850. All of these are a fraction of the cost normally charged in the UK.
There is a good reason for the cut-price deals. Vu is not on any UK medical register and has no known formal training. She operates in domestic homes, only takes cash and, according to victims who spoke to the Daily Mail, leaves many patients ‘mutilated’.
She was first exposed by Channel 5 News last summer when she was secretly filmed offering upper and lower eyelid procedures without asking for the medical history of her client or offering a pre-procedure consultation.
She appeared to be operating from a non-sterile, dingy flat above a Liverpool restaurant.
When shown the findings, the then health secretary Wes Streeting pledged to ‘make sure that we don’t have loopholes that enable this kind of unsafe and unregulated practice’. But over a year later the Daily Mail has discovered Vu is still operating – but now in Manchester.
Multiple victims have told us they were operated on by Vu since late last year.
One of them is a woman who now runs the Reddit online forum page Support4LuyenVuVictim.
‘The trauma after seeing myself [post-surgery] has completely ruined me,’ she said, using the alias Alex for fear of retribution after speaking out. ‘Both my GP and a maxillofacial surgeon [who specialises in facial injuries] said that I have been assaulted.’
She explained that the scarring of the skin above her eye has left her completely disfigured: ‘My eyes are so tight, I can’t lift my brows as they are stitched so low and the skin that’s there is ruched. I can’t even afford to have anything corrected.’
Another victim, using the alias Mary, went under Vu’s knife in November 2025, paying £1,000 for a full facelift. She was left with significant scarring and an uneven face. ‘I think she took more from one side than the other,’ she said.
‘She did the left side first and then she did the right side. It seems like she spent a lot less time on the right side, which is saggy still.’
The procedure took an hour – a typical facelift should take at least two hours – and Mary was aware of several patients before and after her. She had one follow-up appointment to remove some of her stitches but a year later still has some stitches in her face.
She has been to her doctor and to hospital twice to try to get them removed. ‘I’m still swollen, sore and itchy. I’ve got scars front and back on one ear,’ she said.
She has tried to get compensation from Vu, but says it’s now impossible to contact her. This is one of the hallmarks of unregistered clinicians: they can disappear, leaving victims with no opportunity to claim recompense when things go wrong.
For all her problems, Mary said she still feels more fortunate than a friend of hers who went to Vu for a facelift and now has to wear a headband to hide the scarring.
Ashton Collins, director of safe practices advocacy group, Save Face, said their stories were typical of the numerous victims of Vu she had met.
‘We have women who can’t close their eyes because [Vu] has taken too much skin away and they have to tape their eyes closed at night in order to sleep. You can’t grow that skin back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s insane that tonight you could go off and perform a blepharoplasty on someone as long as you didn’t say that you were a plastic surgeon.
‘Even when these people make reports to the police and say they’ve literally been butchered, there is very little appetite to try to enforce any assault legislation. If these women had been assaulted in streets and had any fraction of what they’ve suffered, the perpetrators would be behind bars.’
Ms Collins said she had been ‘calling for years’ for laws to be enforced and perpetrators to be held to account. But the Government does nothing, she said.
Vu works for herself and repeatedly switches premises, apparently to avoid scrutiny and dodge disgruntled former customers. But she teams up with established beauty clinics to promote her business.
One of these is Fleek Aesthetics, based in Manchester and run by a woman named Cheryl Hogan.
Following the 2025 TV exposé, Vu went dark for a few months. But, soon enough, adverts for her work appeared on Fleek’s social media and were shared.
Ms Hogan boasted how the ‘Bleph Sensation is back… and ready to work her magic once again! Her results speak for themselves – flawless, natural and confidence restoring.’ Other adverts featured a model and boasted Vu was ‘the real McCoy’ who promised prospective patients ‘premium results you deserve’ so they could ‘look like Barbie’.
In other posts, Ms Hogan appeared to accept Vu was ‘not a medic’ but added: ‘Let’s get one thing straight – titles mean NOTHING if the skill, knowledge and passion aren’t there.’
The adverts included phone numbers for potential clients to get in touch. When an undercover the Daily Mail reporter made contact in this way to request a ‘bleph’, a woman called Nixy responded on behalf of Vu. We were provided with a Manchester postcode and a date and time to attend.
‘Mary’ shows scars of botched facelift – she said the procedures were organised by a place called The Clinic Club, which then ghosted her after treatment
Vu advertises her cosmetic services using the nicknames Miss Cindy and the Bleph Lady
On the eve of the planned procedure, Nixy sent a street name and told us to park at a specific place at the required time and ‘call us from your car’. After contacting Nixy to say we were there, a woman in open-toe sandals and patterned trousers emerged from a property a few doors down expecting to meet our reporter.
Because of safety concerns, the Daily Mail chose not to send the undercover reporter into the home, so we had parked a little way away and observed from a safe distance. When the woman found no one was there to meet her, she went back into the house.
We continued to monitor the address for the day and saw five other women park outside the same spot at hour-long intervals, to be met moments later by the same woman in patterned trousers who took them to the house she had come from.
Each visitor emerged an hour later in sunglasses with Vu’s signature stitches above their eyes.
Although Vu is wielding the scalpel, safety campaigners said Cheryl Hogan appears to be deeply involved in the operation, both as a promoter and enforcer.
Ms Collins, of the Save Face advocacy group, said multiple Vu victims have backed out of interviews with her because Ms Hogan had threatened them.
One woman who also wishes to remain anonymous said she was too afraid to send us photos, as her scarring is so recognisable she fears Ms Hogan, who has her home address, would seek retribution.
Another victim, who we’re calling Rose, told of her deep regret after receiving a blepharoplasty from Vu in October 2024 that she described as ‘something different’ to what she had expected.
She received a ‘Korean blepharoplasty’, said to be Vu’s speciality, which involves skin being pulled up and stitched just under the eyebrow. These are popular with people with an East Asian heritage who do not have eyelid creases as pronounced as Western women.
But Rose is white, meaning Vu gave her a blepharoplasty that does not suit her face shape.
Rose has tried to disguise the scar’s appearance by getting it tattooed as if it’s part of her eyebrows. But nobody will touch the area – it is so close to her eyes it would be dangerous.
Dr Elizabeth Hawkes, a consultant ophthalmic and oculoplastic surgeon and founding faculty member of specialist training programme Aesthetic Ocular Safety, examined the disturbing images of Rose’s face post-surgery.
‘The incision has not been carefully created,’ she said. ‘The skin has not been carefully closed and the aftercare, the scar management, has not been properly adhered to or any advice given.
‘And so that scar has contracted and she could find it difficult to close her eye.’
Dr Hawkes explained that while sub-brow blepharoplasties are real surgeries offered in clinics, stitching around the eyebrow itself can cause serious issues.
This is because the skin around the eyebrow is thicker than the eyelid, so even if a surgeon measures the correct amount to cut, the scar could still contract over time, making it hard for patients to close their eyes.
While regular eyelid plastic surgery is a low-risk procedure, Dr Hawkes warned that infections around the eye from an unregulated job in an unsanitary environment can lead to chronic dry eye and loss of vision.
‘I’m shocked that this is even happening,’ she said. ‘Aesthetics is one thing, but when you’re talking about cosmetic surgery it’s a different level because of the risks of complications. It’s not just the experience of the surgeon, it’s also about the environment that the operation is carried out in.’
Vu’s victims have also said that she gave them drugs which she said were antibiotics, steroid cream and lidocaine, all of which would require prescriptions that can only be written by doctors or certain other medical professionals and some pharmacists.
Rose said she was given pills after her surgery which had foreign writing on the label. She is unsure what language it was.
Not all of Vu’s customers come via Ms Hogan and some, like Mary, said the procedures were organised by a place called The Clinic Club operating out of Hertfordshire and London.
Like Vu, The Clinic Club also ghosted Mary after her treatment, making it impossible for her to contact them for help after post procedure complications.
The Clinic Club was run by ‘beauty consultant’ Ricky Sawyer – whose celebrity clients include Katie Price – a notorious practitioner of liquid Brazilian Butt Lifts (BBLs) who injected filler into clients despite not having a single healthcare qualification.
Last year, Mr Sawyer was barred from performing liquid BBLs until 2028 after one woman suffered sepsis – a life-threatening reaction to an infection – and nearly lost a leg following one of his procedures. He did not respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment.
Such is the concern about cowboy surgeons that in February a parliamentary committee urged the Government to ban ‘high harm’ procedures immediately without further consultation.
Last month, former chief medical officer for NHS England, Sir Bruce Keogh, penned an open letter to Health Secretary Yvette Cooper alongside other members of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS) telling her that ‘nothing has changed’. ‘Without [additional laws], patients will continue to be misled into believing they are in safe hands, even when the law does not adequately protect them,’ he said.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman told us they owed it to ‘all those whose lives have been devastated by botched cosmetic procedures, to tackle these dangerous practices and take action against the rogue operators responsible’.
He added: ‘In the meantime, for anyone considering a cosmetic procedure, we would urge you to check the provider’s qualifications and insurance and avoid treatments that appear suspiciously cheap.’
Meanwhile, Luyen Vu has moved on. When the Daily Mail returned to the Manchester home where procedures occurred a few weeks later, all was quiet. A woman who answered the door said she lived in the house with her family and denied knowing anything about the cosmetic surgery that had taken place on the premises.
Vu and Ms Hogan both failed to respond to our repeated requests for comment.
But Vu’s services continued to be advertised on social media, suggesting that once again she will set up shop in another suburban street to continue her maiming of all-too-willing customers.
- investigations@dailymail.co.uk
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