‘Modern Family’s’ Reid Ewing Opens Up About Plastic Surgery Addiction

Modern Family actor Reid Ewing is opening up about his addiction to plastic surgery.

In a blog post for Huffington Post, the 27-year-old star wrote that he made his first appointment to meet with a cosmetic surgeon at age 19. “I genuinely believed if I had one procedure I would suddenly look like Brad Pitt,” said Ewing, who’s best known for playing Haley Dunphy’s (played by Sarah Hyland) boyfriend Dylan Marshall on the ABC hit comedy.

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After his first surgery, he spent two weeks wearing a full facial mask and hiding from everyone (“Afraid someone would find out I had work done, I took my dog and some supplies, left Los Angeles, and headed to Joshua Tree,” he explained). When it was time to take off the mask, Ewing revealed that the results were “nothing like I had expected.”

“My face was so impossibly swollen, there was no way I could make any excuse for it,” he continued. “So I planned to hide out in my apartment in LA for another week until the swelling was less dramatic.”

Ewing returned to his original doctor in a panic, hoping to have another procedure, but the cosmetic surgeon refused to operate on him for another six months. So the TV star found another doctor, and despite knowing that this new surgeon was less qualified, he said he didn’t care. That surgery turned out to be a nightmare (“Only a few days passed when I noticed I could move the chin implant under my skin, easily moving it from one side of my face to another”), leading Ewing to go under the knife again.

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“For the next couple of years, I would get several more procedures with two other doctors. Each procedure would cause a new problem that I would have to fix with another procedure,” he said.

In 2012, Ewing vowed to never get cosmetic surgery again despite his insecurities about his appearance.

“Body dysmorphic disorder is a mental illness in which a person obsesses over the way he or she looks. In my case, my looks were the only thing that mattered to me,” he said. “People with body dysmorphic disorder often become addicted to cosmetic surgery. Gambling with your looks, paired with all the pain meds doctors load you up on, make it a highly addictive experience.”

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He concluded: “Plastic surgery is not always a bad thing. It often helps people who actually need it for serious cases, but it’s a horrible hobby, and it will eat away at you until you have lost all self-esteem and joy. I wish I could go back and undo all the surgeries. Now I can see that I was fine to begin with and didn’t need the surgeries after all.”