When Krystina Butel was 15 years old, she went on a holiday and decided to get her caricature done. And then she fell in love with the drawing so much that she has spent the past 15 years and over $200,000 trying to look just like it.
Krystina, now 30, has gone through five boob jobs, lip injections, botox, teeth whitening and semi-permanent makeup just so that she could resemble the drawing of herself. “When I saw the caricature for the first time on holiday, I was jealous of it,” the salon-owner from West Yorkshire revealed. “She was so glamorous. She was everything that I wanted to be. It was like holding a carrot out to me, showing me what I could be.”
While most people would have chosen to simply keep the drawing as a souvenir, Krystina decided to actually make herself resemble it. So she spent a large fortune on beauty treatments and surgery to achieve her goal. And it appears that she is far from being done.
“My caricature keeps me going with my dream. I’m closer to it now than I was 15 years ago but there’s always something else I can get in terms of surgery to be more like it,” she explained. “I can always rely on my caricature to show me what I need to do next. I never think that I’m done for good with my plastic surgery. She shows me that there’s never enough.”
Krystina’s immediate plans include getting an eyebrow lift, butt implants, further breast augmentation, more botox, fillers, and bigger lip implants. Surprisingly, she says that she was a total tomboy as child, and completely uninterested in her appearance. She was the only girl in a four-child family, so her mother would try to make her look pretty, which she detested. But she started to grow more interested in her looks at the age of 14, when she went to work as a hairdresser at a local salon.
Krystina said that she had experimented with hair extensions and makeup while working at the salon, but she had never considered plastic surgery. But then she turned 15 and she went on that fated trip to Ibiza with an older friend and her children. According to Krystina, it was meant to be a family vacation – a short, relaxing break to ‘get away from it all’.
Towards the end of the holiday, as she was strolling through the streets of Ibiza with her friend, an old man shouted them over and asked if they wanted to get their caricatures done. They agreed, and the portrait was completed within a matter of minutes.
What was intended to be a simple holiday souvenir turned out to be a life-altering event. While the old man did an ordinary portrait of her friend, he chose to make a rather raunchy caricature of Krystina. In the picture, he depicted her topless with a rubber float around her waist.
“When I saw the caricature for the first time, that was it then,” Krystina said. “I was so happy, I knew exactly what I wanted to be. I wanted to look like that cartoon. I felt envious of it and I got this urgent feeling in me. I wanted to look that right now.”
“I adored how over-the-top she looked and how done-up she was. I loved her massive boobs and tiny waist. I loved her eyes, hair and lips too. I liked the whole thing. It was as if the artist had seen the potential in me, what I could be. He showed me what I could be if I pushed myself to the limit.”
So when she returned to England, Krystina started off by wearing more makeup and using sunbeds to achieve her tanned appearance. She also worked harder to earn more money to afford beauty enhancement surgeries and treatment. In 2001, at the age of 17, she opened her own hairdressing salon, and also had her first surgical procedure – a $6,000 boob job that took her from a size 32DD to 34FF. By the time she was discharged from the hospital, she was already planning her second boob job. Her current bra size, believe it or not, is a whopping 36K!
Over the years, she has managed to raise a lot of money, spending most of it on her appearance. Since her early twenties, she has been getting regular lip injections every six months or so. She also gets teeth whitening, semi-permanent makeup tattooing, eyelash and hair extensions, and uses sunbeds quite regularly.
Krystina even managed to track down a tattoo parlor in Yorkshire to get heart-shaped tattoos etched on her nipples. “You can’t see her nipples in the picture but I imagine the girl in the caricature having heart-shaped ones under her hair,” she explained. “It’s about what you see in the drawing and I envision that.”
“The surgery is definitely addictive, you get a buzz from it,” she admitted. “The feeling before the surgery is like Christmas Eve to me. I love the sensation of being put to sleep – it’s heavenly. I know I’m going to wake up afterwards and see something different in my body.”
Krystina said her looks get mixed reactions from various people. Her fiancé David supports her in everything she does, and he’s quite happy with all her decisions. Her family hasn’t ever objected to the surgeries, either. But not everyone is that understanding.
“I do get stares when I walk down the street and sometimes, people can make mean comments at me. They don’t bother me, though. I just get on with my life,” said Krystina.
“The girl in the caricature is like who I am now. She’s confident and happy. She doesn’t care about what other people think and she doesn’t need to go with the crowd. Just like her, I’m different to the rest and I don’t need anyone’s approval.”
The artwork currently hangs proudly in Krystina’s living room and continues to inspire her to get more surgery. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop having surgery,” she admitted.
“When I get older, I’ll have to do more things to my face to keep it looking like this.” Meanwhile, for her next procedure, she plans to go to Brazil or America because she doesn’t think any surgeon in the UK will be able to improve or transform her any further.
