Beauty seekers who aspire for a pair of “manga legs” or “chopstick legs”—thin, long, and white gams as straight as chopsticks, like a manga character—“calf-muscle blocking surgery” has become trendy. The procedure removes some nerves on gastrocnemius muscle in order to slow its growth, leading to slimmer calves.
Compared with procedures like Botox, which require regular shots, calf surgery is lauded by online influencers as a "simple" one-time process to get rid of several “unimportant” and “rarely used” nerves with lasting effect, and allegedly no side effects. A hashtag related to the procedure attracted over 260 million views and 24,000 comments on Weibo in a couple of days in late May.
However, health experts
pointed out that after these nerves are removed, people cannot walk as fast, or run or do other active sports that requires the use of calf muscles, without falling; moreover, their lower legs will probably recover to original size or even become deformed because of compensatory growth in other parts of the calf.
The procedure originated in France in 1985 as a way to treat club foot caused by spinal cord or cerebral injury. It was first performed as a cosmetic procedure in China around 2005, but is no longer offered at legitimate plastic surgery hospitals because the removed nerves cannot be recovered and the impact is irreversible, according to the
Beijing News. Despite those warnings, two Beijing hospitals that the newspaper visited had
received a flood of reservations for this service during the Dragon Boat Festival holiday from June 12 to 14.
