Peru Two cocaine smuggler in glam new look after Netflix show

Former drug mule Michaella McCollum was snapped looking glamorous as she celebrated a global Netflix deal nine years after she was found with a huge quantity of cocaine with an accomplice. Now an ex-jailbird, Ms McCollum looked nothing like the photos from when she was marched to the police station as she appeared in a glamorous dress with her long blonde locks on full display. The Irish 29-year-old, together with Scottish accomplice Melissa Reid, was found with €1.6million worth of cocaine in 2013 and sentenced to six years and eight months’ imprisonment in a horrific Peruvian prison. Now the snaps capture the moment she celebrated her new docu-series High: Confessions of an Ibiza Drug Mule – which aired on the BBC last year – being released globally on Netflix.Posing in front of a Netflix logo cake, the mum-of-two posted the pic to her 86,000 Instagram followers with the caption: ‘F***ing celebration cake! Netflix worldwide weekend.’The new show has hit the charts across the world, including the number six spot in South Africa, Canada, Slovenia, Switzerland and Czech Republic, seventh in Netherlands and eighth in Sweden, Austria and Romania.The snap was met with an outpouring of love and support from Ms McCollum’s followers, with one saying: ‘Loved the series! It has a super important message, you can learn from your mistakes and change. You are a strong woman overcoming all those challenges and facing the consequences of your mistakes! Enjoy a beautiful life now.’Another added: ‘You’re so inspiring in the way that you made the best of your situation and worked hard to achieve what you wanted.’Both Ms McCollum and Ms Reid, who earned themselves the nickname the ‘Peru Two’, took up hair styling while in prison. Peru Two cocaine smuggler in glam new look as Netflix show dominates charts (Image: Instagram / michaella_mccollum) The Peru Two appearing in court in 2013 after being found with a cocaine stash (Image: Getty)Speaking on the BBC doc, Ms McCollum said: ‘I learned the prison had their very own beauty salon, more like a few chairs and mirrors and a concrete room, but for me it was heaven. I got a job and I would do different hair treatments, colouring and cutting, blow-dries, waxing, nails, massage.’I had no real qualifications, I was winging it but I was good at it. I had a lot of clients.’She added that the salon was ‘heaven’ in prison, and helped her secure parole. Both women were released from prison in 2016, and returned to Europe later that year.Ms McCollum later became a mum when she gave birth to twin boys Rafael and Rio in 2018. She has also penned a book on her time in prison, titled ‘You’ll Never See Daylight Again’, although explained how she didn’t think she’d make much money from it.READ MORE: Conor Benn stripped of boxing license after failed drugs test [REVEAL] Ms McCollum arriving at court, where she was sentenced to over six years in prison (Image: Getty)In a 2019 interview with Matt Cooper on Today FM’s The Last Word, during which Ms McCollum broke down in tears, she said: ‘I did get a lot of offers, a lot of TV offers that were paying ridiculous amounts of money to do interviews or to do TV shows and I refused, you know I never did interviews. I did do an interview with RTE but they never paid me anything.’I thought this is a good way to just say I’m sorry, I know I’ve done something wrong but when I was offered things after that I thought well this isn’t what I want to do. I don’t want to go on TV and talk about this and make money.’I could have done that several times.DON’T MISS: Gangs of Albanian sex traffickers and drug lords mocked UK system [REVEAL]Germany announces plan to legalise cannabis for recreational use [INSIGHT]UK could be open route for drug smugglers with Border Force strike [ANALYSIS] Ms McCollum is almost unrecognisable as her Netflix show comes out (Image: Instagram / michaella_mccollum)’And I think people can see that even though some people think I’m profiting from this. I mean realistically I’m not going to make a lot of money from the book.’I would have made more money by doing two TV interviews so I did the book because I wanted to tell my story. If I wanted to cash in on it I would have been making money a long time ago.’She had previously told how one of her biggest regrets was sniffing lines of coke and ketamine off a McDonald’s table at breakfast before the ill-fated drug trafficking trip that would lead to her arrest.She also explained how she was high on drugs when she agreed to be a smuggler, but believed she only needed to go on a trip from Ibiza to Barcelona – but ended up on a long-haul flight to South America, where she would end up being caught at an airport trying to smuggle cocaine.