Plastic surgery comes for the waist

A drastic new procedure called rib modelling, which inflicts tiny fractures to the ribs, emerges at the forefront of body modification

- Linda Wells

Remember when American former journalist Lauren Sanchez lashed her waist with laces and boning until it was so tiny, you could wrap your hands around it? Of course you remember, given that her wedding to American businessman Jeff Bezos was all of a few months ago.

There was also a time when a woman squished into a piece of vintage gossamer silk sprinkled with sequins. That was all the way back in 2022, when American reality TV star Kim Kardashian strained the seams of Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr President” dress.

The tiny, tortured waist has returned as a bodily preoccupation, ready to eclipse voluminous breasts and buttocks as areas of obsession, manipulation, distortion and angst.

While some women are Scarlett O’Hara-ing themselves into gowns fitted with bespoke corsetry, plastic surgeons are working on more permanent methods to create the wasp waist, the ant waist or what the leading surgeon in this emerging sub-speciality calls the “Barbie waist”.

The new approach to the waist originated in Russia in 2017, when a doctor decided to explore an alternative to rib removal, which was the way some surgeons though not many — had whittled the waist in the past.

The procedure is exactly what it sounds like: an operation in which the surgeon completely or partly extracts the 11th and 12th “floating” ribs. It is an operation that carries “considerable risks” and “significant detrimental effect on lung and respiratory functions”, wrote Dr Alfredo E. Hoyos and his colleagues in the medical paper, Waistline Aesthetic Slimming By Puncture And Parallel Approach For Rib Remodeling Procedures.