Tech millionaire Bryan Johnson’s face ‘blows up’ after scary, botched procedure: ‘Fat injections from donor’

Bryan Johnson's latest escapade in his pursuit of longevity went seriously wrong. He shared a close-up of his bloated face after an anti-ageing fat injection.

Millionaire tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, 47, is spending millions to ‘bio-hack’ his body and reverse the ageing process. Recently, he took to Instagram to share how one treatment — injecting fat from a donor into his face to attain a more youthful look — went horribly wrong. He posted jarring close-up pictures of his bloated, red face, saying using donor fat on his face caused a 'severe allergic reaction'.

Bryan Johnson looks unrecognisable after a recent anti-aging procedure. (Instagram/ Bryan Johnson)

Bryan's pics after ‘severe allergic reaction’ on face

In a long post alongside his recent pictures, Bryan – who is trying to live to be 150 -years-old – revealed that the idea for the fat injections came from his weight loss from his strict 1,950-calorie diet. The fat injections, which made his face swell to the point where he couldn’t see, were the latest effort in Bryan’s 'Project Blueprint'.

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

Bryan on 'Project Baby Face'

In his caption, Bryan wrote about his latest therapy session, "'Have any of your therapies gone wrong?' In starting Project Blueprint, I had one question: are we the first generation who won’t die? To begin, my team and I evaluated all the scientific literature on longevity and aging, stack ranking the best performing health therapies with the most compelling evidence."

He added, "Caloric restriction was among the early selections. My daily calorie consumption dropped from 2,500 to 1,950. As a result, I got really lean and lost a lot of fat—especially in my face. My biomarkers were improving, but I looked gaunt. People thought I was on the brink of death. As Blueprint grew into a global movement, the scrutiny increased. Facial fat, we discovered, is pretty important for how people perceive youth. It didn’t matter how good my biomarkers were if I didn’t have face fat."

"So, we started ‘Project Baby Face’ to explore whether we can restore lost volume. We selected a first therapy: injecting a fat-derived extracellular matrix to restore volume by stimulating my body’s natural fat growth. 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," he added.

Bryan on what went wrong

He also wrote, "Immediately following the injections, my face began to blow up. And then it got worse, and worse, and worse until I couldn’t even see. It was a severe allergic reaction. Thirty minutes after the treatment, I was scheduled to meet with @valleyhack of Bloomberg to talk about Blueprint. I called him and said, 'Hey, so that you’re not alarmed, 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?'"

A week later, Bryan’s face was back to normal; opening up about it, he wrote, "Seven days later my face was back to normal and we were back in the trenches reformulating plans for our next attempt. Building a product is one thing; being the product is a whole different thing."