It's crazy some of the things us women are willing to do all in the name of beauty. Take 28-year-old Sydney V. Smith from Los Angeles for instance. The girl has a serious obsession with her neck. In fact, she has been purposely extending it with copper rings and now it's about 11 inches long. Her goal is to become a "giraffe woman." Now why would someone want to do that?
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According to Smith, her obsession dates back to her pre-teen days. "I've always had a long neck," she told the Huffington Post. "In middle school, they called me 'giraffe girl.' Then I saw the pictures of the long-necked tribes in Thailand and Burma in National Geographic and I became fascinated with them."
It got so out of hand that in middle school Smith started wrapping cut-up coat hangers around her neck to wear to bed in efforts to extend her neck. "My parents thought it was ridiculous," she added. These days she wears tight copper rings around her neck, like what Burmese women from the Kayan tribes wear. Smith has been dedicated to wearing these things for about three years now and strangely enough, she finds them comfortable too.
"I had missed the comfort from the pressure on the top of my neck and shoulders and had been thinking about doing it again for a while," she said. "The comfort and exhilaration of this process was really all I was after."
But here's the problem: Smith's copper rings come with consequences. According to Dr. Jonathan Nissanoff, a southern California orthopedic surgeon, they're actually not all that safe. "If she's finished growing, then all she's doing is stretching her skin or putting the bones into traction by pulling them apart," he told Huffington Post. "The rings aren't going to make her bones longer. Once she removes them, her neck will come back to size." He claims they can injure nerves in the neck, cause scarring and even foul odor from mold growing on the copper. Now that's just gross!
As beautiful as I do find these tribal women to be, I don't think what Smith is doing makes any sense. The woman is already stunning, why go through all this trouble just to have a longer neck? I think it's time she gives those copper rings a rest and hopefully this doesn't give young girls out there any ideas!
Image via Syndey V. Smith/Twitter
