Growing up, my favourite magazine was Mizz, which was a bit like a kids’ Cosmopolitan. When I was about 11, I saw that you could enter a competition to win a photo shoot and be featured in a two-page spread in the magazine. For a while when I was younger, I really wanted to be a model – yet another dream of mine – so to enter, I made a little booklet of photos with a quote on it about why they should pick me. I ended up winning and having a full photo shoot printed in the magazine, which I could take into school and show everybody – which, of course, I loved!
Those pictures look quite funny now because at the time I had extremely short dark hair – I’m not a natural blonde! I’d always wanted to cut my hair short, but my mum had never let me, until finally I went into the hairdresser and asked for a ‘Frankie from The Saturdays’ look, which meant I ended up with hair long on one side and cut short on the other. I just thought she was so cool to have such a different look, so I thought, Yeah, I’ll go for the same!
Eventually, Frankie got the long side trimmed the same length as the short side … so I got that as well. By this point, I had hair almost the same length as Tommy’s now. It was so short – horrendous on me, really! I actually put a picture of it on my Instagram Stories and people were so shocked to see me with this short dark hair; it wasn’t even a bob – it was not my favourite look. Of course, I loved it for about two weeks and then I hated it, exactly as my mum said I would. Mum had told me, ‘Don’t do it. You’re not gonna like it.’ But I did it anyway!
After that, I spent about two years watching ‘how to grow your hair naturally’ videos on YouTube, learning what I could put on my hair in terms of different oils, home remedies and products to help it along. Luckily, my hair grows quite fast, but it was not a good stage. I don’t know why I thought I could pull off Frankie’s haircut when I was a kid with no clue how to style it! It was a really silly thing to do, but everything’s part of the learning curve.
So, not all of my beauty adventures have been total successes – but it didn’t really matter. In fact, I think that’s probably why the magazine picked me as the winner: because not many girls my age would have had that kind of hair at that time. I had ‘cool’ hair that was a bit different for a young kid – and that’s exactly why I’d wanted to have it cut like that, so that people would be saying, ‘Did you see that? Molly-Mae had her hair cut like that!’ I always wanted everyone to be talking about what I was doing, so having my hair cut short was just another way to achieve that.
In a way, it’s lucky I was like that, because it wasn’t just dodgy haircuts I was dealing with. As my dad mentioned earlier, I was born with a big strawberry birthmark on my forehead, which might have bothered some people growing up. For a long while, I didn’t want to get rid of it. I wanted to keep it because – again! – I actually liked having something about me that was a bit different and made me stand out from the other kids.
As I was heading towards secondary school, my parents thought maybe it was time to get it removed, because they didn’t want me to get bullied or anything like that – I don’t think I was very aware of how kids could be. Luckily, I hadn’t had any problems with anyone teasing me about it, I think because I was confident about it. It wasn’t an insecurity of mine at all – which, looking back now, is perhaps surprising, because the birthmark really was noticeable; it was raised and bright red. If I had been much older, I think I would have been upset about it, but at the time I just wasn’t. Still, my parents encouraged me to maybe think about getting it removed, so eventually I did, and it’s left just a tiny scar on my forehead that’s very faint.
My parents have since told me that when I was little, other adults would often stare at me because of my birthmark, which of course they didn’t like. That’s why, on occasion, when I’ve noticed a child with a strawberry birthmark like mine, I’ll go over to chat to their parents if the moment seems right, just to reassure them: ‘I had a birthmark exactly the same as your baby’s and as I got older, it shrank and lost its colour. Then I had it removed and now I’ve just got this little scar.’ It’s not that I think the parents care about a birthmark – mine didn’t – but I know they can worry for their child, because when you’re so little and innocent you have no idea that you’ve got something different about you that people could be mean about. Thankfully, I didn’t really realise when I was younger that some people might think that my birthmark affected my looks. I just didn’t care!
There is still a big part of me that doesn’t really worry about how I look. For instance, I only wear make-up when I have to. Every single day I have off, when I’m not making content, I’m in wet hair, with no make-up. I love dressing down, I love tracksuits and comfortable clothes. That’s another reason why I hate nights out: because I hate putting on high heels and a dress where you have to hold in your breath all night, then you go out and girls are looking at you, guys are looking at you … it’s too much! I literally love to be at home with a hoodie on and just relaxing. If I didn’t have the job I do, I’d wear gym clothes and no make-up every day.
I really appreciate the days where I don’t have to do my hair or make-up and can dress comfy.
I still have a love for it – don’t get me wrong – but because it’s now my job, when I don’t have to work, I don’t want to put on make-up. In the same way, when I worked at the gym, I lost my love of exercise a bit because working out became, well, just work. I’ve lately felt like I’ve lost my love for doing my face for an evening out. I spend a lot of my time glammed up for photo shoots, so when I get my chance to I love using different skincare to feel fresh-faced.
It’s hard, too, having to look a certain way all the time. That’s a pressure that I do feel sometimes: because my work involves having to look good and take pictures and wear nice outfits, it’s almost like modelling, at times. Maybe you don’t look like you’ve made an effort when you’re wearing no make-up, but sometimes I actually feel better without it – it’s just nice, isn’t it, to be able to rub your face?! Sometimes it’s just nice to not have to worry about the things you’d worry about while doing your job, which for me involves make-up and hair. Sometimes you just want to have a spot on your cheek, not try to conceal it, and just sit there and eat chocolate and not be that influencer!
And if I can get away with it, I won’t wear make-up on my grid. I really do love to do no-make-up pictures, like when I’m on holiday, for example. People like to see a bit of everything – full glam, but also make-up-free. As long as you switch it up now and then, people stay interested. That’s why I always change up the backgrounds of my pictures and shoot them in different locations, in different cities and towns and countries, because that’s what keeps people engaged with your life: what are you doing next? Where are you going next? But it’s much, much harder to shoot an Instagram picture without make-up, just because the camera can really wash you out – you just need a little bit of something on your face. I know Instagram so well and I know what works for me.
The pictures I post on Instagram are the highlights of my life – the good part of my day – and I hope that’s clear to my followers. What you see on Instagram is not what life is like 100 per cent of the time.
It’s probably worth saying here that, in the society that we’re in now, pretty much most influencers and girls do edit their pictures. And I’m not going to sit here and say I don’t edit my pictures because I do – but I don’t edit them to alter my appearance. I’ll never change my body or my size. There are apps where you can, say, change the tone of the photo and brighten it up, to make the colours pop, so I’ll use those – and I’ve been very transparent about it.
I’ve made videos on YouTube about how I edit my Instagram pictures, and I’ll show the stages from start to finish, in terms of how I remove things from the background or add a filter or sharpen a photo. It’s enhancing what’s already there. And I make that very clear on my socials: that the way I edit is more to make the picture look better as a whole. It’s not to fundamentally change or warp the way I look. Because if you want to see the way I look outside of a photo, you can just go over to my YouTube and watch me live! You can’t filter YouTube at all.
I think that’s why my audience are very trusting of me, because if they want to see a more off-duty version of me, everything’s there for them to see, completely unfiltered and completely raw, even first thing in the morning when I wake up and I’ll be vlogging and haven’t brushed my teeth or brushed my hair! I think it’s nice to show those two sides: the YouTube side, where it’s more relaxed, and the Instagram side, where it’s glossier.
And I’ve always been very transparent that when you see someone’s Instagram pictures, you’re seeing just one snippet of that person that they’ve chosen to give you. While I do think my Instagram’s a good representation of how I look in that moment, no one looks the way they do on Instagram all the time – it’s just not the way it is! For 90 per cent of my life, I’m literally in pyjamas or something just as comfy, with no make-up on, hair in a bun. So people need to remember that Instagram is not real life. It’s literally what that person is choosing to put out; and, let’s be real, not everyone’s going to want to put out a picture of themselves having a bad day or not looking their best.
It’s just like a highlight reel – the best parts of everyone’s lives. On my YouTube, I always say, ‘Take Instagram with a pinch of salt – it may look like I just nipped out to grab a quick Starbucks, but it may have taken me 100 tries to get that picture! But it’s my job to show the outfit that I’m wearing and show you guys what I’m up to.’ So, enjoy what you see on Instagram – I do! – but just remember it’s not always what it seems.
I’ve always had a massive interest in hair. I enjoy doing my own and, as I mentioned, I used to work at a hairdresser’s when I was 14. Because I’m quite a girly girl, I used to watch hair tutorials all the time on YouTube: how to curl your hair, how to put it in a protective bun … and, after I cut my hair short and it was the biggest regret of my life, how to grow it more quickly!
So maybe it wasn’t a surprise that I dyed my hair for the first time when I was 15. I did it behind my mum’s back, tried to dye it blonde and then had to tell my mum when it had all gone tits up and I needed her help to fix it.
I had always wanted to be blonde, and I’d thought a box dye – the stuff you buy in a shop, rather than getting your hair done in a salon – would take me there, but that wasn’t the case. The box dye was a complete disaster and I ended up with a colour that was nowhere near the bright blonde I was after. My mum was really strict with things like that – I wasn’t actually allowed to dye my hair – but then obviously when I saw what had happened, I couldn’t hide it: ‘Oh, Mum, it’s gone wrong … Help!’ In the end, I had to go to a professional hairdresser to get it fixed and finally ended up closer to the blonde shade I had been aiming for.
Before that, I had really long, thick dark hair in incredible condition, because I’d never touched it. By now, I’ve had blonde hair for so long that I feel like it’s a bit of my identity. I don’t think I’d ever change it. Still, growing up, it did mean I dyed it so much that the condition of my hair was pretty much destroyed – if you dye your hair a totally different colour, it can cause the strands to break and go thin. That’s why I actually ended up having to have extensions later.
I was about 17, and it was so, so expensive. I remember my first appointment cost £900, which obviously was just ridiculous. I had to borrow my mum’s money and promise, ‘I’ll pay you back!’ I look back now and think, What were you doing? Back then, £900 seemed all the money in the world to me. That would have been my whole month’s earnings gone. But again, I just think it was one of those things where I felt, Well, no one else is doing this, so I’ll go and get hair extensions put in (extensions weren’t as big a thing then as they are now). I added length and thickness, and that was when that addiction started.
Maybe I was rebelling a little bit by that point, too. As I said, my parents had been strict to the point that if my friends were going out to get their acrylic nails done for the summer, I was not allowed to do that. I remember so many times my friends would be going to get their nail extensions, and my mum and dad wouldn’t let me: ‘Over our dead bodies! You’re not doing that.’ But after they divorced, I definitely managed to get away with a lot more because there was only one parent to push things past. I guess I felt like I could just get away with murder … and I definitely did for a few years! The minute I could, I went a bit overboard.
It was as if I thought, I can get away with all this stuff now, so I’m gonna go do whatever the hell I want to do! But by doing that, I screwed myself over. Because that’s how the lip fillers came about.
I had just turned 18 when I first started getting lip filler. It might sound surprising that I started getting treatments so young. But I was headstrong: even though my mum might tell me so many times, ‘Please don’t, please don’t,’ if I said I was going to do something, I was going to do it! I’d never been a naughty child and I like to think I was obedient. But when I look back on it, maybe I wasn’t so obedient, because I was doing all these things that my mum told me not to do …
No one I knew had fillers; the area that I grew up in was quite an innocent place, a bit disconnected from things like that. No influencers would come from Hertfordshire, I thought then; it wasn’t like London or Manchester, up-to-date, cool cities! And it was only through Instagram, social media and TV that I even knew about fillers. None of my friends were getting anything like that.
But I wasn’t just looking at the girls I knew from school or work or fashion college. I was looking at people who were older than me, all the influencers that I followed. At the same time, I was trying to become big on Instagram myself. I started thinking, Maybe if I get lip fillers, and cheek filler, then I’ll take better pictures and I’ll get more followers and I’ll get more people that like me … What I didn’t know then is how that becomes a vicious circle, one you can’t really get out of that easily. You end up trying to do more and more in the hopes that people will find you prettier, or cooler – and that’s just not how it works. That was something that I wouldn’t understand properly until later.
Back then, I read something online about a full-face package a clinic was offering: a package deal on getting filler in your lips, cheeks and jaw. That kind of thing was everywhere on Instagram; you couldn’t get away from it. Even now, you can see posts about filler packages or cheek filler or non-surgical rhinoplasties – there’s something for literally everything. And I think because it’s so normalised, by seeing those things on Instagram, you can think that everyone’s doing it. If you see an ad that suggests you can go and get a full-face package for £400 and look amazing, you might think, Oh I’ll go and do that then. I did. When I learned about this injectables deal, I thought, If I go and do that, I’m gonna look unreal! I really want to try it.
Sometimes, there’s a perception that only insecure people do things to their face – the truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever really felt insecure or vulnerable! When I first got filler, I was actually feeling really confident. My followers at that point were just rocketing, and I was thinking, Why are all these girls wanting to follow me? I must be doing something right. It was a real confidence boost, because obviously I could have gone on Instagram, posted my pictures and nothing could have happened, but it was all taking off really quickly.
But what did prompt me to do it was that, again, I was trying to be different, to get ahead of the crowd. My friends certainly weren’t doing anything like that – none of us were in a position to afford it, but me being me, I was just winging it. They all thought I was crazy, but then again, I was always doing different things to my friends at home, because of my not wanting to do the typical thing. So none of that stopped me. A lot of girls on Insta seemed to be getting filler – it was the cool thing to do – and it was just a very minor procedure, I thought, not really a big thing. I hadn’t even been thinking about filler for that long before I ended up doing it. Now, of course, I know that doing anything to your face is something to be taken really seriously.
I didn’t start off with the full package – I got my lips done first. I actually had to wait a little bit to start doing them because I was still doing pageants at the time and I didn’t want it to hurt my chances of winning; the organisers were really against filler. I think in the pageant world, you wouldn’t have been seen as a good role model if you’d gone and got filler. So, as soon as I finished doing pageants, that’s when I did it! Not long after I’d come back from China, I went up to Manchester to have it done, along with my friend I’d met through pageants and who lived up there.
I got 0.5ml of lip filler that first time, which isn’t a big change, and I really liked the result. I didn’t tell my mum at first. I just prayed and hoped she wouldn’t notice because I knew she’d be really upset. But eventually, I ended up telling her anyway, because we have such a good relationship – we have no secrets. ‘Mum … I’ve got lip filler,’ I told her. She was actually quite nice about it. ‘Oh, it doesn’t look bad,’ she said. ‘If you’d told me you were going to get it, I would have imagined you’d end up with big blow-up doll lips!’ And it wasn’t like that at all. It was a tiny little change to my face at that stage.
But I didn’t stop there. In fact, before I went away to try a season in Ibiza, I had 1ml of filler put into my lips at one time, which was too much given that I already had some in there – that was a ridiculous thing to do! But because I was planning to go away for months, I wanted to get loads in because I thought I wouldn’t be able to get it done again for a while. Afterwards, my lips were bulging – they looked like they were about to burst. Soon, my face wasn’t looking better, it was actually just looking worse – especially when I started getting jaw and cheek filler, too.
How that came about was, after I’d had lip filler injected two or three times, I thought, Well, I’ve got my lips done – I’ll go and get it done to my whole face as well. So, I went for the full-face package – cheek filler, jaw filler and lip filler – which cost around £500. And the first time I got that done, I actually liked the way I looked. I only had a small bit of filler injected during the procedure, so it actually did what I wanted it to do and made my jaw look really sharp – I now had a right angle for a jaw. I liked it because that was what was quite in at that moment; everyone wanted to have a ‘model’ jawline. So, I was quite happy with it at first.
After that, I’d go maybe every six months for more. People do go for top-ups – the filler used is not classed as permanent – but I was going overboard. Looking back, it was just a downhill slope, really. I think that’s my biggest regret with lip filler, that it led to me starting to put filler in different parts of my face. The lips were one thing, but I think messing around and putting filler in different parts of my face was just so dangerous. Doing that changed the way I looked completely. I looked like different people before and after I had it done.
I was in a vicious circle, where I just kept going back for more and more and more.
At the time, though, I didn’t think like that. In fact, I decided to get something else changed, too. Three days before I left to go on Love Island, I went to the dentist for composite bonding. How it works is, your natural teeth stay as they are, and they put a layer of white composite material over your natural teeth to make them look perfect. And, in retrospect, that’s another massive regret of mine because they looked so fake. There was literally nothing wrong with my natural teeth, but somehow, I’d convinced myself that they didn’t look good.
As I’ve found myself more in the public eye, one thing I have had to deal with is ‘before-and-after’ pictures – when they find old photos of you and compare them to how you look now. It’s never really bothered me, but one thing I would point out is that everyone’s face matures, whether or not you’ve had filler; your face ages. No one’s face stays the same from 16 to 20! So even if I hadn’t had filler, those before-and-after pictures would still be out there and people would say, ‘Oh, you’ve had this done and this done.’ People are convinced I’ve had a nose job … and I haven’t. But people always want to say that you’ve had these things done. I didn’t really mind that when it first happened, and I still don’t.
That’s not to say I haven’t got upset about what people say about photos of me, though. Coming out of Love Island, I went to get my filler done again and opted for another full-face package of jaw, cheek and lip fillers. That was the big one! I remember the girl that did it was injecting 2ml of filler here, 2ml of filler there, 1ml of filler in my lips. In other words, I had loads. How much did I have altogether? God knows.
After having that load of filler done when I first came out of Love Island, I haven’t actually had filler again since.
Soon after that, I filmed an outro to a YouTube video. I’d just gone to LA for a massive shoot with PrettyLittleThing and needed to film the last part of my vlog, where I said goodbye, so I just turned on my camera quickly to record a quick message: ‘Thanks for watching, guys, see you soon, bye!’ But because I’d had all that filler injected the day before, my face was just so sore and swollen that it looked honestly horrendous. Someone took a screenshot from that video, and it just went viral. That picture of me looking so swollen literally went everywhere, and everyone was talking about it: ‘What’s Molly done to her face?’
I was more embarrassed than anything, because I never wanted to be that girl that was known for having a face full of filler. I didn’t necessarily judge other girls for that – I’d be thinking more, Oh God, what’s she done? She didn’t need to do that. But I realised that somehow, I’d become that girl without even noticing it. I was just more mortified than anything that people were looking at me as that unnatural, face-full-of-filler girl, and I just hated it. But still, I told myself it looked fine, that it would go down, it was just the swelling.
So, for a while, I just kept hoping that my fillers would just settle down in time. I didn’t realise, at first, that the only way I was going to go back to looking how I wanted was if I actually dissolved them. I was still not 100 per cent accepting that they just didn’t look good. I’d tell myself, I’m being self-conscious – it does look good. I didn’t get this to make myself look bad. It has to look better, I definitely look better than I did before …
It took me really a long while to realise that my face didn’t look better, that actually it looked worse than when I started with it all. My once-sharp jawline was looking more like jowls, sort of hanging underneath. My lips felt lumpy, uneven and unnatural. Over time, I had got a bit more, and then a bit more, and now they didn’t look right.
Of course, by this point my swollen face had been made fun of everywhere online – it was trending on social media and being made into memes – while I had been trolled quite badly. On one level, I didn’t want the trolls to think they had ‘won’ if I reversed what I had done to my face. I think I was also scared that dissolver wasn’t going to work and that there was no way to undo what I’d done. But eventually I admitted to myself, This just doesn’t look right – this just isn’t me.
I felt less confident, more than anything. I didn’t feel prettier. I didn’t feel better. Actually, filler had just made me feel worse.
The final push I needed came when I was out at a PA Tommy was doing. While I was waiting for him, I sent my sister a selfie. The shape of my face in this photo looked so bad: distorted and unnatural. I remember sending her a message saying, ‘Oh my God, look at my face. I’m gonna have to do something about this.’
Thankfully, Zoe is the one person who is always so, so honest with me. ‘I agree,’ she replied. ‘I think you do need to do something about it.’ Finally, I booked in to get my filler dissolved.