A 15-year-old teenager in Brazil passed away in hospital after contracting a serious infection when she pierced her own eyebrow at home, Australian website Perth News reported.
Isabella Eduarda de Souza pierced her own eyebrow with a makeshift needle, using an online tutorial as a guide after her parents refused to let her visit a professional piercer.
Several days after she pierced it, however, her eyebrow and the area around it began to swell, and the infection subsequently spread to her eye.
The severe infection led to her hospitalization, and while in the intensive care unit the teenager suffered from multiple cardiac arrests.
According to Maariv, doctors had initially predicted that even if she had survived the serious infection, she would have been left completely blind. Due to multiple health complications, including the four cardiac arrests, the fifteen-year-old passed away about a week after being admitted to hospital.
Home piercing carries risks such as sepsis, blood-borne diseases such as HIV and hepatitis, and nerve damage, where the immune system’s response to pathogens causes widespread, life-threatening inflammation, which is what happened in the case of de Souza.
Speaking to Perth News following her niece's death, de Souza's aunt said "she was very beautiful, and very special. Listen to your parents and avoid doing irresponsible nonsense."