South China Morning Post
16th May 2024
Living with lupus. Hong Kong make-up artist with the incurable autoimmune disease on empowering fellow sufferers
Charismatic make-up artist Sapphire Shen is passionate about her career. The 31-year-old Hong Kong resident describes her work as an art form that can enhance a person’s facial features to accentuate an outfit and look – and boost their self-confidence.
On her website, My Lupus Diary, she also credits make-up with saving her life.
For more than a decade, Shen has lived with lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease that mostly affects women, and afflicts an estimated 7,000 people in Hong Kong and 5 million worldwide.
For the first 10 months, doctors misdiagnosed her as having other diseases with similar symptoms. Shen was “kind of happy” when she finally had her official lupus diagnosis.
“I know it sounds weird,” she admits, but having been dragged down for so long without knowing why was difficult.
“Something was obviously very wrong with me, but there was no treatment.”
Lupus symptoms may be mild to life-threatening
With lupus, the immune system attacks healthy tissues for no obvious reason, causing inflammation; it may be in the joints, skin, kidneys, blood, brain, heart or lungs. This can trigger a range of symptoms – they may be mild, or lead to life-threatening complications.
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