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THE women who allegedly ran backyard aesthetics clinics here, performing Botox injections, fillers and even nose jobs, may have broken a slew of laws, the authorities said yesterday.
A number of people who happened to be in two such clinics were questioned during raids conducted late on Thursday by the Health and Manpower ministries and the Health Sciences Authority.
The raids yielded a chemical bonanza: bottles and vials of liquid, prescription drugs, sodium chloride solutions and even human placenta extract were seized.
The Ministry of Health (MOH) said yesterday that it was looking at possible offences under the Medical Registration Act and the Private Hospital and Medical Clinics Act; the Manpower Ministry (MOM) said the clinic operators were being probed for possibly violating the Employment of Foreign Manpower Act.
The raids took place the evening before the publication of The Straits Times’ exclusive report about five backyard beauticians who allegedly plied their trade out of their own homes and had run advertisements online.
ST reporters who dropped in on two clinic operators had met three women, all Chinese nationals, who professed to have years of experience and were allegedly performing invasive procedures which only qualified doctors and plastic surgeons are allowed to do here.
In the raid at the first location, an apartment in Landmark Tower in Chinatown, officers seized vials of fat dissolvers, Vitamin C injections and whitening agents and cases of human placenta injections, which are banned here.
The beautician who ran the clinic, known only as Lily, was not in at the time.
ST reporters who went along on the raid heard her flatmates tell officers that she had left Singapore on Tuesday, but did not know where she had
gone.
One said that Lily, who holds a work permit here and is a clerk, is often out of the country for two-week stretches.
She added that Lily’s services were in demand, and that it was usual for her to get 10 clients a week, charging between $200 and $500 for her services.
In the raid on the second clinic in a Bukit Batok shophouse, officers questioned a woman suspect in her 40s.
The woman, who lived there with six others and a child, denied offering cosmetic procedures there and claimed to be “just a study mama” with a son here.
A MOM spokesman confirmed that she was on a long-term visit pass and had a son in school here.
Questioned by officers, she denied touting her services online, claiming that she neither owned a computer nor knew how to use the Internet.
Asked why her cellphone contained messages from clients asking for the prices of treatments, she said she was planning to set up a salon but had not yet done so.
Items that HSA officers seized from the flat included anaesthetic, “hormone growth releaser” and an ointment from China which she said was for her own use.
It is not the first time backroom operators have had brushes with the law.
Last year, a woman aged 48 was fined $7,000 for abetting an unauthorised person to perform a nose filler and injecting Botox in a client’s cheeks. The man who did the procedures is still at large.
Ms Judy Low, a spokesman for Allergan, the company that manufactures Botox, said it was unlikely these backyard beauticians were administering the real deal, because Botox is distributed only to licensed clinics and hospitals.
Genuine vials of Botox have a layer of holographic film on them, marked with the word “Allergan”, she said.
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