We haven’t talked about Brandi Glanville in a minute, although she’s been in the news in recent years. She often spoke openly of a really tragic medical situation she’s been dealing with since 2023 – a facial parasite which basically wrecked her face and her skin. In the past year or so, she’s been getting back on her feet health-wise. She attended the Sundance Film Festival in recent days, and ahead of her appearance, she thanked her plastic surgeon for trying to repair her face after the parasite did so much damage.
Brandi Glanville is sharing a new development in her two-year-long health struggle that she says has been caused by a facial parasite. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum, 53, posted on Instagram on Sunday, Jan. 25, sharing a glimpse of the cosmetic procedure she recently underwent. The reality TV personality smiled in a selfie as she praised her plastic surgeon for helping her get ready for the Sundance Film Festival.
Glanville captioned her post: “Thank you Dr. Nicholas Nikolov the amazing CellSound and for preparing me for The Sundance Film festival & looking forward PBM Princess movie event at Kemo Sabe.”
Nikolov is the same plastic surgeon that Glanville worked with in December 2024, when she told Entertainment Tonight that she spent upwards of $70,000 trying to address the facial “parasite.” PEOPLE reached out to Dr. Nikolov for comment.
Glanville was one of several celebrities who attended the Jan. 24 screening of the documentary Side Effects May Include: The Hidden Costs of Prescription Drugs, produced by Rachel Strauss. The screening was hosted at Kemo Sabe in Park City, Utah.
The photo of Glanville comes amid her ongoing struggle with facial disfigurement, which she said began in July 2023. In recent years, the reality star has shared theories that a facial parasite is living just below her skin, causing her disfiguration. In her ET interview, Glanville said that she believes her health issues were caused by something she ate while filming the Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip in Morocco. She later claimed that she could see and feel the unknown “parasite” moving within her face if she “messes with it,” saying it resembled “tiny bubbles bursting” on her skin. “I feel like it’s s—ing or having babies in my face,” she said.
I remember seeing photos of Brandi when the parasite was doing the most damage to her face and it was awful. It brought up so many body-horror fears and it was crazy that so little could be done to help her in real time. Anyway, I have no idea what her plastic surgeon had to work with post-parasite but if she’s feeling better, so be it. She probably just feels lucky to have a face at this point.
Photos courtesy of Getty.










That is a nightmare situation that would probably take me out. It’s good that she’s feeling better about her skin and heath.
I’m a medical doctor and I can tell you that the likelihood of a “parasite” causing all of this is in the like <0.0005% range.
whatever happened to her face was most likely one of two things: a botched procedure or a self administered "remedy". there's a well known condition called "delusions of parasitosis" that compels people to do some really awful things to themselves.
I say this as someone who did work in Central America and East Africa and I have seen what actual facial parasites do, and this ain't it.
Yeeeeeeah.
Regardless of how or why she got here, that’s hardcore Mar-a-Lago Face.
Can that…even happen? Can you ingest a parasite that then gets under your skin? I mean….that sounds wild. It does seem like the obvious thing that happened is an infection of sorts from a procedure.
Yes, she saw Heather Dubrow’s doctor husband and he basically told Brandi that what was happening to her face was being caused by her. She didn’t like that answer.
Brandi has also said that she has a compulsion to pick at her face. Whatever the cause of her skin issues, it must be heartbreaking for her nonetheless.
I’m with you on this one. It seems that there would be more specific detail about what the parasite was if there was one. Especially since she believes it was something she ate. There are very specific parasites that can enter via the GI tract and if that’s what happened, and it caused that much damage, researchers would be all over it.
Yeah most followers of RHOBH don’t buy it. She likely got botched (cheap) surgery or fillers.
She’s not recognizable.
My initial reaction is that it’s probably related to all the filler and Botox she’s had over the years.
She probably started with bad skin, combined to hollywood vanity, wanted to take care of it, it got botched and here we are blaming a facial parasite – which it is not according to above comment. Anyway, she was a beautiful woman pre-everything, too bad whatever happened to her happened. Hope she’s well.