Ex-model claims agent told her to eat cotton balls to suppress appetite

A former model is claiming an agent once advised her to eat cotton balls to stay trim.

Speaking with Variety, Esmeralda Seay-Reynolds said she was scouted by Click Model Management in NYC at 15, but the 130-pound Pennsylvania native was dubbed “too mature” — read: too heavy — at the time.

After dropping a whopping 20 pounds to a slinky 110, she signed with Next, a popular agency, only to allegedly endure unsafe conditions and further criticism over her appearance.

Seay-Reynolds said an unidentified agent instructed her to ingest “organic” cotton balls at 16 to feel full and stave off hunger.

“I remember my agent saying, ‘Cotton balls are organic, so it’s fine if you just swallow them to make yourself feel full,’ ” she recalled.

The Post has reached out to Nsxt and Seay-Reynolds for comment.

Joel Wilkenfeld, Next’s co-founder, told Variety that the “agent would have been fired right there on the spot” had a model brought such an accusation forward.

Meanwhile, Seay-Reynolds claimed she witnessed “size zero girls puking their guts up” in the bathroom stalls at Fashion Week around the same time, about a decade ago, and only received $130 for the six weeks of work.

“I don’t know if that is how much I should have made or if my agency just took that money. I have no idea because they don’t give you receipts,” she said.

Matters only worsened during a 2014 photo shoot in Reykjavík, Iceland, where she said she was forced to scale a glacier in frigid weather, walking in nothing but a slip dress and heels at the direction of an unidentified photographer.

“He made us change up there,” alleged Seay-Reynolds, who was 17 at the time. “We had to get naked. His assistant grabbed my arm when I [protested] and was like, ‘You’re not leaving. You will take too much time.’ ”

At one point, the photographer allegedly told her to “jump over a crevice” that “plunged at least 20 feet,” but her stylist stepped in to stop the life-threatening leap.

She claimed she was also told to lay on frozen lava beds before a treacherous walk among the country’s famous hot springs that “will melt your flesh off.” The photographer, she alleged, barked orders to “get off the [safety] path” despite the dangers.

Then, she claimed the photographer tore down a “Danger. Do Not Enter” sign at the entrance of a cave, forcing the young model to pose on “ice that will rip right through you” with one wrong step.

“You’re told to do it, and you do it,” she explained. “And he is the adult, he is in charge.”

Being insubordinate, she said, would be a professional death sentence. Not only would she be blacklisted and “eff up” her career, but everything she had suffered for would be for naught.

Upon returning home, her agents allegedly admitted the photographer was “known for this.”

Seay-Reynolds also claimed she was never paid for the gig.

“When we send models to photo shoots, we vet the people, and we hope that that model would call us if they were exposed to conditions such as this,” Wilkenfeld said. “The unfortunate part is we’re not on every shoot.”

The photographer blamed Next for sending Seay-Reynolds, who “was refusing to eat anything.” The photog claimed to Variety he immediately called the agency to express worry that the young model had “an eating disorder.”

Her poor relationship with food prompted her exit from the modeling industry.

Seay-Reynolds suffered from seizures and liver failure and was told she was “too vascular” for modeling, she revealed in a 2021 interview for “Real Women/Real Stories.”

“No one cares about model problems because they sound like pretty-people problems,” Seay-Reynolds, who eventually checked herself into an eating disorder recovery center, told Variety.

“They think modeling is Kendall Jenner being paid $10 million for an Instagram selfie. But the reality is the rest of us are living in ‘The Hunger Games’ literally. Pun unintended.”