“It may have been porn,” Zoe says, explaining what propelled her to board a flight from London to Houston without telling anyone where she was going or why. Her destination: the operating room of a doctor she’d found on Instagram, “which is crazy, I know.” Zoe—not her real name—is a successful, sophisticated, Ivy League–educated 34-year-old who has never had plastic surgery of any kind. But that was before she elected to get a labiaplasty “purely for cosmetic reasons.”
A labiaplasty is the surgical reduction of the skin and tissue around the vaginal opening, a procedure that’s been gaining popularity and controversy in equal measure over the last 30 years or so. In Zoe’s case, she wasn’t happy with the size and shape of things in that particular region, even though “no one can see it,” she says, and “no one ever said anything about the way it looked.” This was simply an issue in her eyes and hers to address. “I like most things about the way I look except my vagina. Loads of my friends have gotten boob jobs. But my boobs look great. This is taboo and that isn’t.”
