Health And Wellness

The Odd Way Women Are Changing The Way Their Nipples Look

Photo: B-D-S Piotr Marcinski / Shutterstock
woman getting nipple surgery

Free the nipple ... and let it get plastic surgery!

For many years now, it's been no secret that breast augmentations are a very popular surgical procedure for women to get done. However, in more recent years, the trend has moved to nipple augmentations.

Yes, the nipples, because obviously nowadays, you can seemingly and literally get every single part of your body augmented in some way. 

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But seriously, in 2017, a cosmetic surgeon in New York City was saying that he had been seeing a surge in the number of women asking for nipple operations.

“People are looking at every detail. It's not enough now to get a breast augmentation or rhinoplasty — women want to fine-tune every element. And these days, that's possible,” Dr. Norman Rowe, a board-certified plastic surgeon with the American Board of Plastic Surgery, said in an interview. “This trend has really come about in the last six months — a year tops.”

The trend came to be known as getting "designer nipples."

Not really sure when we started to describe nipples with a word that used to just be used to define handbags, but here we are.

Plastic surgeon Dr. Dana Coberly describes the procedure on her site as, "A designer nipple is the result of a surgical procedure in which the shape and contour of the breast, nipple, and areola are changed or enhanced."

This type of surgery has actually been around for a while, and Coberly also says that it's a common surgery for women to get after childbirth or as part of a breast reconstruction surgery. 

However, the trend of "designer nipples" gained its popularity a few years ago after celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Rihanna were all starting to gravitate towards sheer tops that proudly showed off their nipples.

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“My patients come in with pictures from magazines of nipples that they want; they want to wear see-through dresses too, and that makes them take a closer look at their nipples,” Dr. Rowe explains.

Patients come looking for everything from a change in the color of their nipple to more symmetry to reversing their innie nipple to an outie. Most of these surgeries, says Dr. Rowe, are minimally invasive.

Women even come asking for surgery when they have a nipple that protrudes more than the one they were born with.

“I've had a number of women tell me that, when they're wearing a bathing suit, they want their nipples to be more prominent,” he admits, basically saying that what many of his patients want are “headlights.” “Right now there's a real trend of women wanting their nipples to show and project,” he said at the time.

Since the popularity of this trend has shown that there's basically no point in bras anymore, could that be the real reason why Victoria's Secret might be going out of business?

This is a conspiracy that will have to be looked into further.

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Cara Sprunk is a writer and Senior Vice President at Illuminate Social. She has been featured in MSN, Wonderwall, Insider, and more. Follow her on Instagram.

This article was originally published at Women's Health. Reprinted with permission from the author.