UK Woman Develops Severe 'Elephant Skin' Rash for 10 Months After Allergic Reaction to Dental Veneers

A UK woman was left with a severe skin rash that she says was an allergic reaction to a routine dental procedure.

Lily Lindsay paid more than £1,000, or about $1,200, for dental composite veneers— a common, cheaper alternative to porcelain veneers — to correct her teeth before her best friend’s wedding, according to a South West News Service report shared by The New York Post.

“Composite veneers are thin shells placed on teeth to correct their appearance, fix minor chips or cracks, or make minor corrections to tooth alignment,” according to Verywell Heallth, which adds that they’re made of “composite resin.”

Two weeks after she got the veneers, Lindsay, a 29-year-old from Aberdeenshire, says she started experiencing red, itchy eyes, dry lips, and dry skin.

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“My veneers gave me immensely dry and flaky skin — like elephant skin,” Lindsay told South West News Service.

“Day-to-day, my face would get a little more crusty, itchy and red,” she said. “It was so painful under my arms — I couldn’t even put my arms down or shower.”

Lindsay says doctors initially dismissed her condition as dermatitis, which the Mayo Clinic says is a general term for skin irritation. 

She was then diagnosed with eczema — chronically inflamed skin — when the rash didn’t improve. Lindsay was prescribed a steroid cream, but when that didn’t help, she ended up in a “vicious cycle” of trying new diets and topical creams to improve her condition. 

“It was absolutely consuming me,” she said.

“I couldn’t do my work, I didn’t want to see my boyfriend… I couldn’t be bothered feeling like this,” she said. “I was just so low at how I looked. It got to the point where I just didn’t want to be here anymore. I felt like a failure.”

Lindsay says she ended up taking anti-depressants, since “no doctors could help me.”

Five months after getting her veneers, Lindsay says she started to get dizzy and that her vision was impacted. After going for blood work which confirmed she was inflamed internally, Lindsay decided to remove her veneers.

“[My dentist] was so worried that filing them off may give me an anaphylactic shock —but luckily, it was fine,” she said, according to The Daily Mail.

And about ten months after her symptoms started, Lindsay says “my face had completely cleared up.”

“Even though resin-based restorative materials are considered safe, their constituents can leach out and cause allergic contact stomatitis [aka, an inflamed mouth],” the National Institute of Health said.

Lindsay said she hopes people learn that there are “risks” to these dental procedures, as “I don’t ever recall seeing, or signing anything that says I might have an allergic reaction.”

“It’s not something people really think about.”