The blonde bombshell on the cover of Sunday Style magazine in Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper yesterday could blow more than a few Hollywood hotties out of the water.
But appearances are often deceptive – not the bombshell’s appearance, I hasten to add, but the extraordinary story behind it.
Ten years ago on November 19, Lauren Huxley (pictured at top before her devastating injuries) was left for dead by a random attacker in the garage of her Sydney home.
Robert Farmer, now serving a life sentence, had bashed the 18-year-old student around the head and face with a hammer and then tried to set the garage alight to obliterate evidence of his crime.
![Lauren-1](https://spaandclinic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Lauren-1-337x450.jpg)
She fought for her life in hospital for months. The injuries to Lauren’s head were so deep a nurse told her Mum, Christine: “I don’t like her chances.”
But with Lauren’s grit and her family’s love and determination she survived – then the next gruelling ordeal began: her rehabilitation from devastating injuries and their consequences, physically and emotionally.
Lauren had to learn to walk, talk, feed herself and re-learn the nuances of normal life all over again; a slow and painful process in every sense of the word for her and her loved ones.
For the purposes of this story I am going to focus on her aesthetic rehabilitation, which in turn has helped restore her confidence – let’s call is “sass”, as Nicki Belle and Helen Koi (more of them in a moment) do – and zeal for life.
Procedures such as dermal fillers and anti-wrinkle injections (a descriptive which does not do the many benefits of neurotoxins such as Botox justice) are often dismissed as vanity fare. Yet they can be profound life changers.
I met Lauren nearly five years ago at the Face Today clinic in Sydney’s Chatswood, mid-way through her “rebirth”; the subject of a story I was doing for a website I edited at the time.
![lauren-during](https://spaandclinic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/lauren-during-750x450.jpg)
Internationally renowned cosmetic injector Nicki Belle RN and her business partner and general manager Helen Koi had taken Lauren, parents Christine and Pat, and sister Simone under their wing a couple of years previously as a number of major reconstructive plastic surgery operations had done all the incredible magic they could do.
Yet Lauren was still left with scarring and a lopsided face, especially her smile – nerve damage from her injuries, combined with muscle wasting as a result, which had a debilitating impact on her self esteem above and beyond what she had already suffered.
Plastic surgeon Dr Paul O’Keeffe referred her to Face Today, where Nicki and Helen conduct a considerable amount of pro-bono work for people with facial disfigurements, in part facilitated by the companies who supply them with dermal fillers and neurotoxins – without fanfare.
When I met Lauren she about to start her first job, for a bank in the city. She was also dating her first boyfriend since the attack.
She was still fragile – at points in the interview she would become very emotional, as in subsequent TV coverage the story generated – but it was clear she was improving physically and emotionally every day in every way.
![lauren-2](https://spaandclinic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/lauren-2-337x450.jpg)
According to yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph/Sunday Style, Lauren still “works for a bank in the city and has had a few serious relationships – one for a year with a gentleman she met on Tinder – and is saving to buy a property. She loves to travel, dance and shop.
“She can’t remember the attack and doesn’t dwell on what it cost her: `I am always so busy. Time flies, it goes so fast. I am trying to make the most of being young, still in my 20s, while I have the time’.”
A gutsy girl is Lauren, and amazing folks, her family. Not to mention the medical team who went above and beyond to help make this some kind of miracle happen.