Two weeks after Charisse Massey returned from Istanbul, Turkey, where she’d flown for breast- and butt-enhancement surgeries, the 23-year-old mother of two realized that something was wrong.

As Massey revealed to journalist Symeon Brown, one breast had “a gaping wound where a nipple should be,” he writes in “Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy” (Atlantic Books), out now.

“Tomorrow I could wake up and half of the boob can be black and fall off,” she told Brown.

“It’s scary, it doesn’t smell good. It’s rotten flesh.”

Massey also had a Brazilian butt lift (or “BBL” for short), an infamous procedure popularized by Kim Kardashian — and also a cosmetic surgery with the highest mortality rate — in which fat is taken from a patient’s waist or stomach and inserted into their buttocks.

But when Massey, a micro-influencer from Manchester, England, woke from her nearly nine-hour surgery, she was in incredible pain.

She soon learned that unbeknownst to her, breast implants had been inserted into her buttocks, and they were being rejected by her body.

Another surgery was performed to remove the implants, and although her blood levels were dangerously low, she was released from the hospital after just four days. 

Back in the UK, Massey was hospitalized when her health continued to deteriorate.

She was diagnosed with necrosis, a flesh-eating bacteria, and learned that at least one of her breasts “was rotting due to a severe infection from an untreated blood clot,” writes Brown.

When Brown reached out to Avrupamed, the Turkey-based cosmetic surgery company that operated on Massey, the reply from a spokesperson was “haughty and aggressive,” he writes.

“A notable lack of concern shone through their reply, which was strewn with spelling errors. They accused Massey of being desperate for attention.”

Since her 18th birthday, Massey had gone under the knife “as regularly as on her summer holidays,” writes Brown. She’s already paid a small fortune for lipo, implants, and veneers.

Last year, she even got dermal fillers — injections to smooth our wrinkles and other facial imperfections —so that her face would always look like it does with an Instagram filter.

Massey is one of the hundreds if not thousands of aspiring social-media influencers vying for the attention of strangers, everywhere from Instagram to YouTube to TikTok, who are willing and even eager to subject themselves to physical and sometimes psychological torture in pursuit of fame.

This pseudo-profession didn’t exist a decade ago, but today “millions of children, teenagers, and adults are trying to go viral and capture our attention in a dogfight for followers, fame and, ultimately, fortune,” writes Brown. 

The biggest influencer superstars, like Kylie Jenner, can earn up to $1.8 million for a single Instagram post.

A legion of imitators are trying to follow in their footsteps, becoming what Brown calls “a new type of hustler.”

But are the rewards worth the self-flagellation?

“I want the curves, the hourglass figure, the Kardashian figure,” Massey told Brown.

And while how you look may be the main currency in today’s influencer economy, reaching that aesthetic can have disastrous consequences.

Brown spoke to one fledgling influencer who’d spent thousands for a boob job in Turkey, only to find out after she’d returned home that she’d died during surgery and had to be resuscitated on the operating table.

Though the CPR resulted in several of her ribs being fractured, her doctors conveniently forgot to mention any of this before discharging her.

Just weeks after getting BBL surgery overseas, aspiring YouTuber Fleur (not her real name) noticed that her backside was beginning to leak.

“The injected fat was being rejected by her body and rotting through the pores of her skin,” writes Brown. “The outcome is not uncommon for a procedure that requires a body to comply with a store of fat that is not supposed to be there.”

Although it led to an infection that landed her in the hospital — she had “a crater the size of her fist in her butt,” writes Brown — on her Instagram page, Fleur still presented herself as happy and healthy, showing off the overinflated butt that nearly cost her her life.

“I want the curves, the hourglass figure, the Kardashian figure.”

Influencer Charisse Massey

Most of the women that Brown spoke with never shared the details of their ordeals publicly, partly because of embarrassment but also because they hoped that the companies who offered the surgeries —often at steep discounts — would invite them back for corrective work. 

Yasmin, a 26-year-old Instagram micro-influencer, has had a laundry list of free (or mostly free) procedures over the past five years, from BBL to breast implants to several rounds of lipo, despite only having a few thousand followers.

But she’s valuable to companies like Clinichub, Avrupamed, and Spectra, which peddle cosmetic procedures on Instagram, because “nobody trusts big influencers,” writes Brown.

As Yasmin put it, “They needed a regular girl to talk about it.”

So Yasmin played that part, glossing over the risks and downsides and “shout(ing) from the rooftops about her new confidence and the paid opportunities she receives from having a figure like a Coca-Cola bottle,” Brown writes.

It’s not just women mutilating themselves for more followers online.

Nicholas Perry — better known by his YouTube moniker Nikocado Avocado — has attracted more than 6.5 million subscribers over four channels just by binge-eating insane amounts of junk food, sometimes well over 10,000 calories in one sitting.

Since 2016, when he was a relatively healthy vegan vlogger, his weight has more than doubled since he became a mukbanger — a South Korean term for eating extreme amounts of food while talking to an audience—ballooning up to 350 pounds.

Some of his videos are extremely disturbing to watch, like when he deals frankly with the depression brought on by his overeating, and one especially harrowing video, titled “Nobody Likes Me, I’m Done,” where he appears to have an emotional collapse, shaving his hair onto a plate full of noodles and poached eggs, and then rubbing it across his face.

Though it seemed like a cry for help, the video earned a shocking four million views.

Taylor LeJeune, a 33-year-old influencer based in Louisiana who went by the TikTok handle wafffler69, attracted almost 2 million followers by using his body as a comedic foil, consuming disgusting and often expired food like canned beef from the 1960s.

He died of a heart attack on Jan. 11, and many of his fans didn’t make the connection (or didn’t care) between his untimely death and the way he abused his body for likes and follows. 

“RIP Waffler69,” one admirer tweeted.

“I’m having dollar store egg rolls today in your honor.”

The damage done isn’t always physical.

Ebenezer Lembe, a 37-year-old West African immigrant to London who went from “being homeless to earning a living being racially abused on the internet,” writes Brown.

His YouTube channel — where he live streams with fans in real-time, and they “tip” him to control what happens — can get brutal, especially when so many of his 9.3K followers are “young white internet kids in their twenties and teens who regularly used the N-word,” Brown writes.

But Lembe doesn’t mind being the personal online plaything of racists, who can control what he says or what happens to him with tips as small as $5.

(A follower once paid for “F–k Tha Police” to be played while Lembe was being pulled over by the police.) “I’d still rather do this than work at a 9-to-5 somewhere,” he told Brown.

While his job may sound like “the digital equivalent of a modern-day minstrel show, where he shucked and jived for a dollar,” Brown writes, Lembe doesn’t see it that way.

“Every job is shucking and jiving,” he explained.

Whether you have 2 million followers, 200,000, or just 200, the “clout” of having any social media presence whatsoever, whatever the personal cost, seems to many like their only chance to have any real stability — especially to middle-class millennials who feel like their economic and career prospects “have gone to s–t,” Brown writes.

Andy Warhol once said that in the future, “everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” But in 2023, many young people are feeling that being famous for fifteen minutes might be the only career path open to them.

“The addictive rewards of accruing followers by any means necessary are warping human behaviour, both on- and offline,” writes Brown. “

For influencers, deception is lucrative and becoming increasingly extreme.”

Massey, despite the damage she’s done to her body, isn’t about to stop having surgeries to reach that Kardashian ideal.

“If I had that desired look and that desired body,” she says, “it could lead to deals with clothing brands and gym brands.”

“It’s a financial pathway,” she told Brown. “I said it to my parents [and] they said, ‘Why are you getting all this surgery?’ And I said, ‘I’m investing in my future.’ They couldn’t understand.”