Brooklinn Khoury was 20 years old when a dog she knew suddenly attacked her.
It happened in Arizona, in November 2020. The young woman, a skater and model, lost her entire upper lip and part of the area around her nose. Doctors couldn’t simply reconstruct what had been there. For nearly a year, she searched for specialists who would tell her it was possible, until she found Dr. Nicholas Do, a UCLA plastic surgeon. The first surgery lasted 20 hours: they took tissue from her forearm and connected it to the blood vessels in her face to create the foundation of a new lip. Six more surgeries would follow.
What she did differently was not hide anything. While recovering, she shared every scar, every stumble, and every attempt at applying makeup to a mouth that had not yet fully healed. She explained it this way: when it all happened, she desperately searched for someone who was going through the same thing, and found no one. Today, her page is exactly what she needed and didn’t have.
