Chinese media recently covered a shocking beauty trend that allegedly has young girls getting nerves in their legs severed so that their calves appear slimmer.

It’s crazy the extreme lengths some people will go in the name of beauty, or at least their idea of beauty. Take for example this new and disturbing trend reportedly dubbed “calf blocking”, which essentially has young, healthy girls getting “less important” nerves in their legs surgically severed to permanently atrophy their calf muscles, so that their lower legs appear slimmer and straighter.

In a May 20 interview with The Paper, Dr. Zeng Chun, Deputy Director of the Department of Joint Surgery and Sports Medicine, Affiliated Hospital 3 of Southern Medical University, said that he was shocked when he first learned that girls were deliberately severing their leg muscle nerves to make their calves look leaner.

“Patients with nerve injury and calf muscle atrophy experience constant pain, and are desperate to find ways of recovering. I did not expect that there are healthy people actively destroying their nerves,” Dr. Zeng said, adding that there is no such thing as a less important nerve, and that once a nerve has been damaged, there is a high likelihood that it will never fully recover.

The Chinese newspaper reports that the term “calf block” is often brought up on beauty-related internet forums and social media groups, where people trade advice and tricks to get slimmer calves. Unfortunately, few of them realize the devastating consequences of the surgical procedure.

On the Good Doctor Online page, a popular online health information resource in China, a girl who had the calf block procedure complained that two months after the operation she couldn’t walk right, her lower legs were always numb and she couldn’t stand on her toes anymore. She was worried, scared and asked the doctor if there was any way to fix it.

Following the revelations in The Paper article, this disturbing beauty trend went viral in China, where many blamed beauty bloggers and vloggers for promoting this type of procedure, but also the girls who undergo scientifically unproven surgeries in a desperate attempt to reach unrealistic beauty standards.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only shocking beauty trend we’ve covered here on OC over the years. A while back we wrote about Snapchat dysmorphia, but also about Thailand’s “buffalo horn lips” beauty fad. and Vietnam’s obsession with white skin.