A woman born with a red blotch on her face and who developed ‘tumours’ in her nose and lips when she was just nine years old has said she has learned to love her face, and no longer tries to hide it.
Nutritionist Daniela Heberle is now 24 years old and boasts 105,000 followers on Instagram, where she posts dietary and motivational advice.
She told media platform UOL Universa that she was born with a haemangioma on her face that cannot be easily removed and that she developed arteriovenous malformations of the carotids in her nose and lips when she was nine years old.
Daniela revealed she has undergone over 20 operations to her face in addition to being bullied as a child. She said: “Kids didn’t want to be my friends, they didn’t want to get close to me and I had no one to do my schoolwork with.
“They didn’t avoid me out of fear, but they saw how their other classmates kept a distance from me and excluded me. I never found it easy to make friends.
“When the tumour started to grow, they invented theories about what had happened to me: They said I had a potato nose, that I burnt my face on the hob, et cetera.”
Daniela now works as a nutritionist and helps her clients with their own self-esteem issues.
She told Universa: “I’m a feminist and I only work with women patients precisely to empower others, to make them free themselves from the burden of looking at their bathroom scales and getting frustrated with their own bodies.”
Despite having had a difficult adolescence, Daniela is now in a happy four-year relationship with her boyfriend, Samuel.
She revealed she is currently undergoing laser therapy to slow the growth of blood vessels that are the cause of her haemangioma.
She told Universa: “Some people do this procedure to clear the haemangioma, but not in my case because I like my blotch a lot. If I had only that, I’d be very happy. What impacts my quality of life today is the tumour.
“If you ask me how I manage to love my skin, I’ll reply ‘the same way you look in the mirror, relate to your skin and like the skin on your face’. It’s normal.
“At some points in my life I have questioned my appearance, sometimes due to pressure from society.
“But now I actually like who I am, I don’t use concealer, I don’t apply foundation. I want people to see my blotch is there, that it’s a part of me and I don’t want to hide it.”
