‘Project Baby Face’ Fat Injections Cause Entrepreneur’s Face to ‘Blow Up’ amid His $2 Million Quest to Look Younger

Bryan Johnson says using donor fat to increase volume in his face for a youthful look caused a “severe allergic reaction”

A software entrepreneur who is spending millions to “bio-hack” his body and reverse the aging process shared how one treatment — injecting fat from a donor into his face — went horribly wrong.

The fat injections, which caused his face to swell to the point where he couldn’t see, were the latest effort in Bryan Johnson’s “Project Blueprint.”

The 47-year-old has enlisted 30 doctors and is spending $2 million this year on cutting-edge science to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old.

In a Nov. 13 Instagram post about his fat injections, Johnson shared that calorie restriction was an early mandate for Project Blueprint.

“I got really lean and lost a lot of fat—especially in my face … I looked gaunt. People thought I was on the brink of death,” Johnson said, even though he had improved his “biomarkers” — which the National Library of Medicine explains are “a characteristic that is objectively measured and evaluated as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes, or pharmacologic responses to a therapeutic intervention.”

Johnson revealed his team discovered that facial fat “is pretty important for how people perceive youth” and that “it didn’t matter how good my biomarkers were if I didn’t have face fat.”

Related: Here Are the 2 Ages in Life When ‘Dramatic Changes’ in the Human Body Accelerate the Process of Getting Older

The next endeavor, he said, was “Project Baby Face,” an effort “to explore whether we can restore lost volume” in the face.

Johnson shared they opted for “a fat-derived extracellular matrix to restore volume by stimulating my body’s natural fat growth” — a.k.a. injecting fat into the face — as opposed to trying fillers. “It’s possible to use one’s own body fat for this but the problem was I didn’t have enough fat on my body to extract, so I used a donor,” Johnson shared.

“Immediately following the injections, my face began to blow up,” he added. “And then it got worse, and worse, and worse until I couldn’t even see. It was a severe allergic reaction.”

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He then confided in a colleague, telling that person, “ ‘You may not recognize me today. I think I’m ok. I hope I’m ok. If I’m not ok, are you by chance trained to perform any life-saving actions?’ ”

“Seven days later my face was back to normal,” Johnson said, sharing that experience won’t deter him from seeking other ways to restore lost volume in his face.

“We were back in the trenches reformulating plans for our next attempt,” he wrote. “Building a product is one thing; being the product is a whole different thing.”