California,April 18: A 19-year-old says she bathes in pigs’ blood to keep her skin looking youthful.
“Chanel, ” a freelance model and actress, is one of the stars of MTV’s True Life: I’m Obsessed With Staying Young.
Chanel explains to her grandmother Lois that “I feel like thousands of years ago” people did that and “they preserved their youth.”
Chanel insists that, despite her young age, she is already starting to show signs of aging, which she is convinced will soon put a stop to her modeling career altogether.
Her desperation to remain looking as young as possible for as long as possible has driven Chanel to a number of extraordinary lengths, most notably covering her body in animal blood , a process she insists will ‘keep the skin looking soft and tight’. Her family, skeptical of the benefits ask for proof, but Chanel is unable to offer anything which backs up her bizarre claims.
The model also shows off a myriad of other ‘beauty fixes’ she uses, including a daily shot of garlic powder, balsamic vinaigrette, sage, and olive oil – which she claims helps to ‘preserve your body’ – as well as a skincare regimen that involves washing her face eight to ten times per day.
She also claims to have eaten placenta, gone on fasts and put her body through many detoxes in her quest to stay young.
Bloody bizarre: The teenager picked up the blood at a local butcher who asked her if she would prefer pork or beef, to which she replies, ‘I don’t eat meat’
The teen’s grandmother, Lois, tries her best to dissuade Chanel of her latest endeavor, saying she could be risking her well being.
‘I’m sorry my grandmother is worried about my health,’ says Chanel. ‘But now that I’m this close to my blood bath, I can’t stop.’
After picking up the pig’s blood from a butcher in a large bucket, Chanel climbs into the tub wearing only her underwear and begins pouring the thick, red liquid all over her body. The model, who claims to be a vegetarian, describes how ‘even the roughest parts of the body like the elbows feel soft, and I think I owe that to the blood’.
Later in the episode, Chanel claims that though she believes the blood bath helped her self-esteem, she ‘has no desire to do it again’.
Luckily for Chanel, the experience of filming with MTV seems to have had a positive outcome. As she reveals in a follow up Q&A with the channel, she was ‘humbled’ by the reactions she received.
‘I never believed I was that off my rocker,’ she adds.
Other blood bathers: The infamous Countess Elisabeth Bathory was said to have bathed in the blood of virgins to stay young, and the benefits of its use are still championed today by the likes of Kim Kardashian
Although the benefits are not proven, the concept of using blood as a beauty product is far from new. The idea of bathing in blood for youth may have originated with the story of Elisabeth Bathory, a Hungarian Countess who was alleged to have murdered hundreds of young women around the turn of the 16th century. Folklore says that she bathed in the blood of virgins to maintain her youth.
Fast-forward to more recent – and less murderous – applications, Kim Kardashian’s ‘vampire facial’ went through a surge in popularity in 2013 after the reality star posted a photo of herself receiving the treatment, which involves drawing a person’s own blood, separating the platelets and then injecting it back into the patient’s face.
A similar new beauty craze involved using a patient’s own blood to create a beauty cream, which was recently offered to patrons at the Dorchester Hotel in London.
