Japanese model and celebrity Vanilla Chamu has been nicknamed "Plastic Sugery Cyborg" for her strange obsession and the lengths she will go to satisfy it.
She has spent a startling 10 million yen (S$124,450) on 30 plastic surgery procedures to fulfil her dream of becoming a living and breathing French doll.
Her face and figure is so drastically transformed that she looks nothing like the mousy-looking Japanese girl she was a decade ago.
She gained fame recently when a Japanese television program titled What's wrong with me managed to contact her and persuade her to appear on the show. Chamu had already been a well-known name in the Japanese plastic surgery industry - notorious for her desire to look anything but Japanese.
She has undergone more than 30 procedures - including double-eyelid surgery, nose jobs, liposuction, eyelash implants, dimple creation and breast implants - but says she is still not satisfied with her looks.
"I want my appearance to transcend human beauty," she said. And her idea of otherworldly beauty? To look perfect like a French doll.
"I'm attracted by the French doll. Nobody would say a French doll is ugly," she told a shocked audience.
Chamu, who keeps her current age a well-guarded secret, said her desire to transform herself began when she was a little child. Shy and quiet when she was young, she rarely smiled or laughed. Because of that, her classmates nicknamed her "The Iron Mask" and bullied her.
"The reason why I didn't smile is because my father hated children. Whenever I cried, my father would be angry and tell my mother to throw me away," she said.
When she told her father about the bullying at school, instead of comforting her or standing up for his daughter, Chamu's father brushed her concerns aside.
He told her brusquely that the reason why they bullied her must be because she is ugly, and told her to endure it.
Unloved at home and shunned at school, she soon began to hate her face. "I really disliked my face - my nose, my eyes, my face shape and my mouth," she said.
Also around that time, she became attracted to the appearance of French dolls. She started having thoughts that if her face looked like that of a delicate French doll, her classmates would accept her and not bully her anymore.
Soon after graduating from high school, she started working as a club hostess to earn money to get plastic surgery. When she hit 19, she went for her first plastic surgery procedure - an eye job.
Chamu had double-eyelid surgery and the corners of her eyes cut to give her bigger and more alluring eyes. After receiving tons of compliments that the surgery made her look more beautiful, she was encouraged to go for more surgery to improve her looks.
She soon progressed to nose surgery, where she had a nose implant inserted and hyaluronic acid injected on her nose bridge to make it taller.
One of her most extreme operations included having the skin of her scalp peeled back and an implant inserted into her forehead to give her a higher forehead and make her eyes look more deep-set. That operation cost her 2.5 million yen.
In total, she spent 7 million yen just to fix her face.
And she didn't just stop there. She decided she still looked too ordinary, and wanted her body transformed as well. She already had relatively large breasts, but she wanted them to be bigger.
She went from a natural E cup breast size to an H cup overnight. After seeing her new breasts, she said: "I need to make them twice or three times bigger than they are now."
Her regular doctor told her it was too dangerous to increase her breasts so drastically, and advised her to make them twice as big instead. She agreed, and underwent the surgery.
But after waking up from anesthesia and taking a look in the mirror at her chest, she was visibly horrified to discover that her breasts were still not as big as her ideal size.
Today her bust size is 88cm, waist 60cm and hip 86cm. She said she plans to go for another boob job when her body is ready. She has no problems financing her operations, as she is so popular with men that she is reportedly the number one female hostess in Japan.
She said she has yet to undergo her most extreme procedure - height alteration surgery. She hopes that the procedure can help her add 15cm to her current 156cm height.
The procedure essentially means that her leg bone will be broken into two, and a device used to keep the two ends millimetres apart so that the bone, nerves, arteries and skin can regenerate, lengthening the limb.
She plans to spend a total of an additional 27.17 million yen in the next few years to further perfect her body.
Despite the relentless trauma she puts her body through, Chamu says she still hopes to be healthy. She told other women out there that if they are unsatisfied with their appearance, they should go ahead and do something to change it.
"If you are negative because of how you look, it will become a spiral of negativity - where the more you hate yourself, the uglier you become,"she said.
While her words of advice may have some sense to it, it may not be applicable if she suffers from body dysmorphic disorder - which she appears to have.
People with this mental illness are excessively obsessed over perceived faults regarding their physical features. Without treatment, people with the disorder may spend the rest of their lives altering their appearance without gaining long-lasting happiness.
She is certainly not the first to risk her life in an unquenchable thirst for physical perfection.
Last year, YourHealth reported on Justin Jedlica - the human Ken doll who's undergone 90 plastic surgery procedures in the hope of attaining the perfect physique.
In an interview with ABC News, the 32-year-old said he had spent more than US$100,000 (S$122,092) in the last decade in his quest to look like a living doll. Along with his chiselled face, he has a G.I. Joe-like body complete with rock-hard pecs, defined six-pack abs and bulging biceps and triceps - all without lifting a single weight or hitting the gym.
"Children play with Barbie and Ken all the time, so it's fed to us from a very young age that that is the epitomy of what is beautiful or what is handsome," he said in an interview with Inside Edition.
The variety show that featured Vanilla Chamu put her unrealistic quest down with the recent trend of women and men wanting to look like living dolls. They brought up the case of Russian-born Valeria Lukyanova, 23, who models herself after the iconic Barbie doll - right up to her long peroxide blonde hair, minuscule waist and huge bust.
She admitted that she has undergone breast enhancement surgery, but insists that the rest of her is natural - albeit with the help of makeup and corsets.
Take a look at the gallery below to decide for yourself: Just vanity, or an obsession taken to far?:
