After seven unsuccessful job interviews, 24-year-old Luke Clark began
to think something other than his CV was playing havoc with his job
prospects.
Potential employers didn’t seem to like the 4cm “flesh tunnel” holes he had in each ear as much as he did.
Clark had begun stretching his lobes at university several years
earlier, and the problem was that when he took the plugs out his
stretched earlobes looked terrible.
Now one of the fastest-growing cosmetic procedures in the UK is repairing stretched earlobes.
The piercings are created either by gradually placing a cone-shaped
taper into the ear and pushing it through a little more each day, or by
having larger-sized tunnels placed into a pierced ear every few weeks to
slowly widen the hole. Once the holes stretch past 1.5cm in diameter,
the earlobe will never spring back to its original shape.
The record holder for the largest flesh tunnels, at more than 10cm in
diameter (big enough to put a fist through), is a Hawaiian man, Kala
Kaiwi.
Cosmetic surgeon Adrian Richards, a clinical director at Aurora
Clinics, has pioneered a technique to repair stretched earlobes. He sees
at least 10 new patients a month for the operation, which is performed
under local anaesthetic and takes about 30 minutes. But, at £1,800 for
two ears, it’s not cheap.
“There’s a lot of negativity around about ear-stretching,” he says.
“We recently treated a golf professional who was joining the PGA
[Professional Golfers’ Association]. They wouldn’t let him join with
stretched ears. I’ve treated a man who was in a punk band but then
became a teacher and needed his ears repaired. We even had a soldier on
Wednesday who had 2cm tunnels in each ear.
Read More:
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/19/cosmetic-surgeons-repair-stretched-earlobes
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