A 33-year-old man has spent five years and $100,000 in an effort to look like his hero – teenage pop idol Justin Bieber.
Toby Sheldon is a songwriter from Los Angeles who has used Bieber’s youthful features as the inspiration for numerous surgeries, including face fillers, a chin reduction and eyelid surgery.
Sheldon’s obsession with his appearance began when he started having treatments to prevent his hair thinning at the age of 23, but really took off when a pre-pubescent Justin Bieber hit the big-time in 2008.
Sheldon, along with hordes of preteen girls, became enamored of the pop star.
‘Once Justin shot to fame his face was everywhere and I all I kept thinking when I saw his picture was, “I want to look like him,”‘ Sheldon says.
Sheldon had already spent $8,000 on hair transplants to supplement his thinning blond locks, but he wasn’t happy with the results.
He took a picture of Bieber to his plastic surgeon to demonstrate exactly how he wanted his hair to look.
‘It took three transplants and a total of $21,000 to accurately lower my hair line, close off my temples and grow back my bangs,’ he says.
Once he had perfected his Bieber-style hair, Sheldon, who admits to a phobia of aging, decided he wasn’t finished.
Toby got Botox and Aquimid injections in his forehead and temples as well as eye surgery, which cost him $4,850, despite everyone – including doctors – telling him that the eyelid procedure was too much. “But it took going to eight different surgeons before anyone would agree to operate on me as everyone thought I was crazy to be obsessing over such a tiny detail,” Toby recalls.
He then noticed other features could be improved as well.
“When I first sought out to look like Justin I only paid attention to specific aspects of his boyish look like his hair and the structure of his face,” Sheldon says. “But the more I started studying Justin and young people in general it’s really their smile that gives them their youthful glow. If you look closely, you’ll notice that when younger people just barely have their mouths open they naturally show their top teeth, giving them a sort of natural and effortless smile,” he adds.
Also called the smile surgery, this procedure is very popular especially in Korea and the number of people who have had it in the U.S. has doubled in the past year. For a whopping $30,000, Toby’s frown has been turned upside down and transformed into a “perma-smile.” SMH.
‘By using Justin’s charming baby face as my inspiration, I’ve been able to restructure my entire look to maintain a much more youthful appearance through plastic surgery.’
Sheldon says he admires Bieber for his youthful good looks, if not his musical output.
‘I didn’t necessarily listen to his music or fawn over him as a celebrity, but his face was just so flawless every change I made was modeled after him.’
In the past five years, Toby Bieber – as his friends now call him, has undergone various cosmetic procedures which add up to a staggering $100,000 in bills. But having so many invasive surgeries was not easy.
He recalls that his smile surgery took more than a month to recover from, and that after his eyelid surgery, he couldn’t open his eyes for a week. However, he believes it was all worth it. “Between our similar hairstyles, baby faced smile and overall youthful appearance I finally look like Justin Bieber and I couldn’t be happier about it,” he says.
Yet he still thinks there is room for improvement. “I know there is more work to be done in order to make a full transformation into Justin Bieber’s doppelganger like a nose job and jaw reduction, which my surgeon has suggested,” the wanna-be Bieber clone adds. However, Sheldon is content to look like a weird 15-year-old boy and to no longer be able to buy liquor without showing his ID.
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