Going under the knife for a tailor-made body

Dying to flaunt your designer heels, but your feet are rebelling? Foot plastic surgery is the latest addition to the list of bizarre procedures, like tummy tuck and butt lifting, which women are undergoing to flaunt (painfully) the latest trends. 

Women have often gone to great lengths for the sake of fashion – from wearing unbearably tight corsets to achieve the inhumanly tiny Victorian waist, to undergoing plastic surgery to be able to pull off the latest fashion trends. Making body modifications to fit into an item of clothing isn’t unheard of. Many women have a dress or a pair of jeans they hope will serve as motivation for losing an inch or two, or women with small chests may keep a pair of ‘chicken cutlets’ in the back of the lingerie drawer to help fill out a certain top.

Then there are devotees of fashion who pray at the altar of plastic surgery and think nothing of making a quick trip to the plastic surgeon to enhance a certain body part for fashion’s sake. Painful and bizarre surgeries to look fashionable are not a new fad, but the latest trend in plastic surgery is to undergo foot surgery to wear impossibly high heels comfortably. Here’s looking at some absurd plastic surgeries fashionistas are willing to undergo. 

Women want Michelle Obama Arms: Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion is as discussed, imitated and lauded as any supermodel’s. According to a poll by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASAPS), 31% of women said they’d like to have arms like the FLOTUS (first lady of the United States), who has a tumblr account dedicated to those toned and elegant arms, while Jennifer Aniston’s arms came in a close second with 29%. And now, women are opting for a procedure called the upper-arm lift, also known as brachioplasty, to show off their newly-enhanced arms in sleeveless clothing. The procedure involves trimming loose skin from a saggy underarm area, popularly known as ‘bat wings’, through incorporation of liposuction to remove excess fat. The ASAPS report quoted plastic surgeons saying that there has been a steady rise in the number of women opting for this surgery as women want ‘Michelle Obama arms’. More than 15,000 patients in the US, 98% of who were women, spent $61 million on arm liposuction, the report said. 

Customised booty: For those who aren’t able to achieve a booty like Kim Kardashian’s, there’s the Brazilian butt lift and augmentation. This procedure increases the size, lifts, enhances a butt’s contours, corrects proportional imbalances and improves firmness so that the ridiculously expensive dress you have been lusting after can finally find the perfect clothes horse in you. A butt procedure will find you in the bootylicious company of British actor Chloe Sims, reality star Heidi Montag and Kim Kardashian – though the latter denies it – but either way has women coveting her booty. 

Defying gravity: Too big, too small, or simply not the right fit for your dress? Women go through multiple boob jobs to make sure that their designer dress is complemented by designer breasts. If they’re too small, then they can be enlarged via breast augmentation, breast reduction can reduce them if they are too big, and if this weren’t drastic enough, complete reconstruction if it’s more than size that needs changing. Reports say that American women parted with more than $12 billion last year trying to defy gravity. Breast augmentation was the number one operation among women, with 3,13,000 surgeries, and breast lifts came in second with 1,37,000 procedures in a year. The internet is filled with slide shows, memes and ‘before and after’ photos of celebs who have enhanced their breasts. While Pamela Anderson is the poster child of breast augmentation, flat-chested runway models have been the inspiration for the reverse. 

Belly button chic: For those of you who think that your belly button is a just a lint gathering receptacle and never bothered to find out if you were an ‘innie’ or an ‘outtie’, here’s news. Scientists claim that some belly buttons are sexier than others. A researcher from the University of Helsinki says that we tend to like navels that are T-shaped or oval and vertical, with a little hooding. With changing fashion, tops have gotten shorter and pants sit on or below the navel, leaving it fashionably exposed. There has been an increase in the numbers of belly button surgeries – making it one of today’s top body-enhancing procedures. 

Thigh gap aspiration: Clara Delevingne’s thighs are, if fashionistas are to be believed, a man’s dream and a woman’s nightmare. The aspiration to achieve the perfect thigh gap has sent women starving and even under the knife. The thigh lift surgery, which takes out excess fat from the thighs and reshapes them to provide a gap, has found many takers who want their thighs to fit into skinny jeans. A model, who was part of a runway show in New York which featured models who had opted for various plastic surgeries, said, “Like many women, I had plastic surgery on my thighs. I work out seven days a week, but I had cellulite and it made me unhappy.” 

Show off those abs: The crop has women doing extra crunches to get celebrity-like abs. But there are those who aren’t too fond of sweating it out, but a crop top they must wear – and the ‘easy way’ out is a tummy tuck surgery or abdominoplasty and airsculpt. A 24-year-old student from California spent more than $6,000 (`3,54,960) in March on a minimally invasive fat-removal technique called airsculpt to address four pounds (1.8kg) of unwanted belly. She said that even though she exercised and dieted, her middle was “doughy.” “I was really intrigued by crops, and wanting to wear one gave me the push to get this procedure done,” she said. 

Designer feet for designer shoes: Cinderella might have never had her happily ever after, if the glass slipper was a chunky uncomfortable stiletto. On the other hand, her step-sisters would have had a better chance, if they had access to the latest foot surgeries like the ‘loub job’ or the ‘perfect 10′. Aesthetic toe-shortening (‘perfect 10′) was administered on a 17-year-old fashion model, so she could wear the shoes her career demanded. Foot surgery is done to make pointy shoes fit better and to shorten second toes that extend beyond big ones. There’s liposuction for the little toe in cases where it’s not little enough, and injections of hyaluronic acid to add padding to the balls of the feet. The aptly named ‘Cinderella procedure’ is just a fancy name for a bunionectomy, a procedure which apparently enables one to wear narrow shoes ‘comfortably’. And if you cannot fit into those extremely expensive pair of designer shoes (and blow it out of perspective), you might be persuaded to think it’s ‘toebesity’ or ‘hitchhiker’s toe’ (an abnormally large big toe that sticks out like the thumb of a hitchhiker) – there’s a surgery for that as well. 

Halve those calves: You’ve found the perfect pair of skinny boots or slim jeans at a sale, but there’s just a tiny problem – the definition of skinny for the makers of the boots and jeans isn’t the same as the dictionary’s, and there’s no way you can wear these boots without slicing your calves into half. For just this reason, women have resorted to botoxing their calves – a process far ‘less painful’ than not being able to fit into skinny boots, apparently! Surgeons use large amounts of Botox to sculpt a woman’s legs and make calf muscles appear less bulky. Women who want their legs to appear slimmer in high heels also get this procedure done.

This article first appeared on the Times of India

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