An EH officer who led the investigation into the ‘Dr Evil’ tattooist and extreme body modifier will present to a newly established parliamentary group looking into the regulation of the industry.
Charlotte Rose, senior EH officer at Wolverhampton City Council, led the team looking into Brendan McCarthy’s work, which led to a successful prosecution. McCarthy was jailed for 40 months for carrying out ear and nipple removals.
Rose will to present this autumn to the all-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for beauty, aesthetics and wellbeing set up in May, and will be calling for national licensing of the industry.
CIEH is also about to launch a survey which will ask for members’ views on the regulation of cosmetic treatments. The results of this will be fed into the APPG inquiry. Newer procedures – such as ‘vampire facials’ – do not fall under the list of regulated activities that practitioners must notify their local authority about. Vampire facials involve drawing blood from the patient, extracting the plasma from it using a centrifuge and then re-injecting it, or derma rolling it, into the patient’s face.
Rose has called for a national licensing scheme backed up by ring-fenced funding.
Rose said: “I think it’s a really big problem there are different activities that are coming forward. Vampire facials hit our area in February/March time and before then, I’d not heard of them. I have grave concerns about the procedure and new procedures keep coming on to the market too.”
She added: “Vampire facials are driven by people like Kim Kardashian. Everybody wants to look different now and they don’t want to pay and go to a private clinic – they don’t have the money to pay for it.
“They resort to going to the high street and putting their trust in these places because they think the local authority is regulating them, but we don’t have the resources.”
