Charlotte Starling is Addicted To Plucking, Unable to Stop Despite Scars

Charlotte Starling, a 27-year-old from Norwich, England, suffers from dermatillomania. She is addicted to plucking hair from her body and ends up leaving her body parts scarred.

 Dermatillomania refers to an ICD (impulse control disorder), which means a person is unable to restrain urges even though they harm the individual.

In this case, Starling got in to the habit of plucking her eyebrows and extra hair from her body to look neat and clean like other women, but she didn't realize she was getting obsessed with this habit.

"I've always obsessed about plucking my eyebrows," Starling said in a Daily Mail report.

"I wanted to get the shape just right and would spend ages plucking out the tiny hairs until they were perfect. Like all young women I wanted to look my best," she added.

She was just 16 when she became a mother and gave birth to a girl in her toilet. She had no idea about her pregnancy and felt she was just constipated.

"I'd had a bad stomach all day and thought I was constipated. I pushed and heard a cry," Starling said.

"When I looked down the toilet there was a baby. I was so shocked I screamed for my mum and she scooped it out," she added.

She explained that she was too young to recognize the signs of pregnancy. Starling and her 17-year-old boyfriend took the decision of looking after their baby.

The couple broke up when the baby, Lousie, was 18-months-old and she met her present fiancé Martin Thompson.

Starling spent all her time looking after her baby, the problem started when her daughter turned four and started schooling. Starling started plucking her eyebrows in order to avoid panicking and worrying about her daughter that is how her addiction started.

"She had been my life, night and day, for four years ever since I was 16 years old. Because I had her at such a young age, I'd never known any other way of life - and I was totally lost without her," Starling said.

"Since I'd become an adult my job was to look after Louise. When she was at school I didn't know who I was and I started suffering severe anxiety," she added.

She started plucking her hair when she was home alone and stopped doing it when her daughter and fiancé returned home. Her habit left her with scars all over her body, on her face, stomach and even her breasts.

"I could pick at the same tiny hair for hours. It would bleed but I still got a sense of relief when I got it out," she said

She tried sharing her condition with her friends but they simply laughed at this matter. She felt nobody cared about her and carried on with her addiction.

All this continued till her fiancé's mother Kathy Thompson saw her scars and advised her to get some help as her condition was serious. She found it difficult to reveal her condition to her partner Martin.

"Telling Martin was the hardest part because I'd done such a good job of hiding it. He was devastated and begged me to get help," she said.

Starling consulted a psychologist in 2011 when she was diagnosed with the condition dermatillomania.

Her condition worsened when she started using her daughter's pencil sharpener for removing her hair after her husband took all her tweezers away. She started growing her nails too so that she could use them.

"I turned myself into a pair of human tweezers," she said.

Her fiancé was forced to leave his job as a plumbing and heating engineer and turn into a full time caretaker for her. She still has hopes of recovering from this condition with the help of counseling and the love and support of her close ones. She has started wearing clothes, which keep her covered and baths in the dark so she does not see her hair and get the urge to pluck them.