DYING to be PRETTY

The global beauty industry is worth more than $500 billion and the rise of social media is fuelling a further boom. But as Genevieve Gannon discovers, buying creams, powders and pills online is fraught with danger. They could be fake, or even fatal.

- Genevieve Gannon

The scene of the tragedy was an Adelaide family home on a spring evening six years ago. Nineteen-year-old Louisa Fioretti had been listening to melancholy music and roaming internet chat rooms when something inside her snapped.

She had always struggled with anxiety, but the condition had become particularly acute during her Year 12 studies when her body-image problems mounted and her relationship with food deteriorated. Her phone screensaver was a fit, beautiful woman to keep her focused on achieving the body she wanted.

That day – October 12, 2015 – Louisa had received a parcel from Colorado, USA. It was labelled “Women’s Multivitamin Health Supplement” but inside was a potent weight-loss agent that shady online sellers claim “annihilates” body fat and appetite. In what is believed to have been an impulsive act, Louisa opened the bottle and swallowed a large number of the weight-loss pills.

The coronial report on what followed makes for harrowing reading. As the pills began to act, Louisa called triple-0 and told them what she’d done. The so-called fat-blasting ingredient was a chemical called DNP (or 2,4-Dinitrophenol).

Paramedic Andrew O’Connor had never heard of it, so as the ambulance sped to the Fioretti home, he researched the chemical with a growing sense of dread. DNP was marketed as a diet pill in 1933, but withdrawn from sale after just five years because of the danger it posed. The compound was initially used in the manufacture of explosives, dyes and wood preservatives.