14 DAY TRIAL // A 28-year-old woman from Los Angeles is determined to achieve the looks of a giraffe so she is trying to extend her neck with eleven copper rings.
Sydney V. Smith became fascinated with long necks after seeing pictures of long-necked women of the Kayan Lahwi tribes of Thailand and Burma on National Geographic. She has been using the practice inspired by those tribes since 2011.
After she began encasing her neck in copper rings, Sydney has been dubbed “The Giraffe Lady.” Smith says the eleven rings that are permanently attached to her neck have stretched it to about 11 inches (27.9cm) long.
When she was a teenager, the woman used to wear wrap cut-up coat hangers around her neck when she went to bed in order to elongate it. When it became obvious that her neck was longer, she decided to stop for a while to figure out what she really wanted.
“I've always had a long neck. 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,” Smith said, as reported by Daily Mail.
At the age of 25, the woman started wearing a custom-made necklace formed by tight copper rings soldered to her neck. The rings are held together by a screw that can be quickly removed in the event of a medical emergency.
Sydney added an extra ring whenever she felt the need. Currently, she has 11 rings attached to her neck and is considering whether to add one more.
“It took a while to learn to sleep with them, but now if I take them off, my neck feels limp,” the woman said.
Although she says she had missed “the comfort and exhilaration of this process,” Sydney was not so keen on exposing her to unwanted attention, so she wore turtleneck sweaters to hide her neck rings and worked restaurant jobs behind the scenes to avoid turning up in public too often.
However, after seeing a Lady Gaga concert, the young woman made the decision to turn her necklace into a permanent accessory.
“Her freak empowerment message made a special kind of sense for me. I figured if she can wear meat dresses, I can be a giraffe woman,” she said.
Orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Jonathan Nissanoff, warns that this unusual practice carries health risks and says that the rings aren't actually extending her bones at all.
“All she's doing is stretching her skin or putting the bones into traction. […] I don't recommend anyone doing this. It could injure nerves in the neck,” he said.