Brandi Glanville, the former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star, has finally reached the moment she spent two years desperately searching for.
After publicly insisting a “parasite” had warped her face and pushed her into financial and emotional collapse, the 53-year-old revealed she now has an official diagnosis for her facial disfigurement.
Highlights
- Brandi Glanville said she finally received a diagnosis after two years fearing a parasite was destroying her face.
- The former TV star spent over $130,000 on more than 20 specialists, but her symptoms persisted.
- She credited infectious disease expert Dr. Michael Scoma for the breakthrough.
The revelation came during an interview with TMZ on Friday (December 5), where Glanville described the moment she finally learned what had caused her facial crisis.
After two years of isolating herself and pouring more than $130,000 into doctors who could not explain what was happening to her, she finally felt the first real sense that she could take her life back.
Former reality TV star Brandi Glanville said she has finally received an official diagnosis for the mysterious condition that was disfiguring her face
Image credits: Getty/Bravo
The former reality TV star described the call from her physician only yesterday as a breakthrough she feared might never come. Her mother cried when she shared the news.
The prolonged crisis reshaped her entire life, destroying her self-esteem, closing professional doors, putting her in financial peril, and even making her consider ending it all.
Image credits: brandiglanville
“Sometimes I sit down, I can’t get up. And it’s so scary, and I was just like, ‘I don’t want to live this life,’” she admitted. “So I had those thoughts, which were really frightening. I’ve never been like that.”
Image credits: brandiglanville
Glanville traced the beginning of her ordeal back to 2023, when she traveled to Morocco to film The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: Ex-Wives Club 2.
She became convinced she had contracted parasites that were distorting and destroying the tissue in her face.
She described feeling like the alleged parasites were “having babies in [her] face,” in a 2024 interview with Entertainment Tonight. Adding that she could feel bubbles “forming and bursting” in her cheeks and chin.
Image credits: brandiglanville
Her symptoms left her in a state of constant panic.
“I have chills and a constant oily foul tasting drainage from face into mouth. It’s acidic and is eating away at my teeth,” she wrote online. She added that all of her lymph nodes were swollen and that doctors kept telling her she was fine.
In her desperation, Glanville applied hair-removal cream directly on the affected area, believing it would damage the “parasite”
Image credits: Getty/Joy Malone
As Bored Panda previously reported, her desperation sent her down an increasingly dangerous path. She first dissolved all the filler in her face in December 2024, but when nothing improved, she attempted a dangerous at-home treatment.
Image credits: Bravo TV
Glanville shocked her fans by appearing in a TikTok video with the lower half of her face severely swollen and red, almost as if she had burned her skin off.
She revealed that, in her desperation, she had applied Nair hair-removal cream without supervision, believing it would “irritate the parasite.”
Image credits: Bravo TV
“I know I look attractive,” she said sarcastically, adding that she had left the product on her skin for seven minutes.
“I’ve been on meds this whole year. I don’t socialize. I don’t go out,” she said. “I’ve just been spending all my money on trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.”
According to experts, Glanville is not housing a parasite in her face, but leftover bacteria from facial injections
Image credits: Getty/Paul Archuleta
In January 2025, Glanville reached out to Dr. Terry Dubrow, a plastic surgeon that cast doubts on the model’s parasite theory.
“It seems to be an infectious process or a foreign body reaction to something she's had injected,” he said.
“There are these two kinds of microorganisms, one's called a Microbacterium and the other is called a fungus, and they can be very difficult to treat and could take six to 12 months of antibiotics to treat,” he added.
“Every minute the microorganism is allowed to stay in her skin and do potential damage she could suffer worse for it.”
Image credits: brandiglanville
As of March 6, Glanville was still waiting for official results from her biopsies. A shift came in July, when she announced she was seeing a new specialist: Dr. Michael R. Scoma, an infectious disease and immunology expert in New York.
Scoma had reached out to her after seeing her anguished posts about the unexplained changes in her face.
In mid-August, she posted a photo from his office showing her face looking significantly improved.
"They say Twitter is the devil but all it took was me screaming in my tweets asking for help for this lovely man to reach out,” she wrote. She even joked that she was excited to “make out” with someone once she healed fully.
Glanville assured her fans that she will be sharing the diagnosis with them soon, but is holding back specific details for now.
"Crazy." Netizens shared their thoughts on Granville's ordeal on social media
