Lyn May has spoken out about the decades-old cosmetic procedure that left her permanently disfigured, recalling how a trusted friend convinced her to let a scammer inject cooking oil into her face.
The Mexican actor and dancer, 75, who performed under the stage name Lyn May during her 1970s and 1980s heyday, shared her account in a YouTube interview with singer Nayo Escobar in June. May began her career as a cabaret exotic dancer before breaking into Mexican cinema with roles in films including 1974’s Tívoli, 1978’s Carnival Nights, and 1979’s The Loving Ones. Her striking looks earned her fame and the nickname “goddess of love,” but she now says a jealous friend exploited that beauty to lure her into disaster.
May told Escobar that in the 1990s, the friend pushed her toward cosmetic procedures despite her natural appearance. The person she was sent to claimed to be administering proper medical fillers that would preserve her youthful look. What May actually received, according to the account she gave, was a mixture of baby oil, cooking oil, and water.
“I remember the woman would take a baby bottle and fill it using a syringe,” May said in the interview. “She would draw it up and fill the bottle and then she would take that bottle and start injecting it into my cheekbones.”
The injections seemed harmless at first, but over time the substances deteriorated beneath her skin. Hard lumps and abscesses formed across her face, progressively distorting the features that had made her famous. The damage became permanent and life-changing.
“When I saw what they had done to me, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to kill myself. I don’t want to look in the mirror anymore,'” May recalled. “I was never going to look in a mirror again. But thanks to my mother… She told me, ‘No, my dear, you still have so much ahead of you, so much of a future.'”
May said her mother talked her through the despair, and she eventually sought medical help. “She gave me a lot of advice,” May continued. “Then I started going to doctors, and they began removing all that stuff. And I still have more to go.”
Surgeons were able to extract only a fraction of the oil mixture injected decades ago. May has undergone additional procedures to mitigate the damage, though much of it remains irreversible. She is reportedly now working with what has been described as a legitimate doctor in hopes of reversing more of the effects.
Images of May’s transformed appearance have circulated widely on social media in recent weeks, prompting an outpouring of sympathy and anger at the friend who arranged the procedure. Commenters expressed shock that someone close to her would orchestrate such harm. “Omg it’s awful that her ‘friend’ did this to her,” one person wrote. “What a horrible thing to do to someone.” Another posted: “I hope her ‘friend’ is in jail. Who needs haters when you have friends?” Others focused on what she lost, with one writing: “She was so beautiful wtf,” and another adding: “She was pretty before all that, how sad.”
May’s career trajectory traced a path from cabaret stages to film sets during a period when her looks were central to her stardom. The unregulated injections, administered by a scammer using equipment as crude as a baby bottle and syringe, unraveled that image over years of silent deterioration before the full scope of the betrayal became visible.
May continues to pursue further treatment with medical professionals as she seeks additional removal of the remaining substances in her face.