Stevi Allen was on a quest to reclaim her body. The 38-year-old mother, candidly, had not been prioritizing self-care. After the birth of her son in 2019, her shape shifted, compounded by the pandemic’s stress, leading her to shed a significant amount of weight. As a single mother, these changes left her feeling less than confident.

Residing in Miami, Allen expressed to the Daily Mail that she longed to have her curves back. This transformation, however, demanded a steep price, both in terms of finances and physical endurance.

In pursuit of her hourglass figure, Allen underwent a Brazilian Butt Lift for the second time, along with a novel and increasingly popular procedure known as ‘rib remodeling.’ This ambitious makeover came with a cost of $38,000 and resulted in six fractured ribs.

Despite the challenges, Allen’s determination to achieve the look she desired underscores the lengths some are willing to go in the name of personal aesthetics and self-assurance.

Six fractured ribs and $38,000 later, Allen achieved the hourglass figure she so badly desired, thanks to a Brazilian Butt Lift (her second, she said) and a startling new procedure that’s gaining popularity.

It’s dubbed ‘rib remodeling.’

The controversial surgery sounds like something conceived in Viktor Frankenstein’s lab: three ribs on each side of the thoracic cage are partially fractured and forced to heal under the pressure of a corset.

Recovering patients’ waists are cinched so tightly that they look astonishingly cartoon-like.

Allen said she underwent rib remodeling surgery with the desire to get her ‘curves’ back. She said the pain during recovery, however, was worse than giving birth to her son

Allen is pictured, left, in March 2024 before her procedure, which she underwent in October that year. 

‘We started to call it Invisalign for the ribs,’ board-certified plastic surgeon Dr Thomas Sterry, who has been offering the procedure in New York City for about a year, told the Daily Mail.

‘The result really depends on how snugly the patient wears the garment. If you wear it really tight, you’re going to get a smaller waist.’

After going under the knife in October 2024, Stevi Allen estimates that her waist shrunk two to four inches – a standard amount, multiple surgeons told the Daily Mail – but not without an excruciatingly painful recovery.

‘It was the absolute worst pain of my life,’ she said. ‘Worse than childbirth, worse than labor, worse than getting a nose job, worse than getting my heart broken when I was 19 years old.’

While she’s no stranger to plastic surgery, she was ill-prepared for just how painful rib remodeling would be, leaving her unable to do ‘simple things’ like pick up her young son or go to work as a cosmetic tattoo artist. It took eight months, she said, for the pain to subside completely.

In hindsight, would she do it all over again if she had the chance?

‘Knowing the pain, it’s something that I would not have done because it held me back from everything else in life that is honestly more of a priority,’ she said, though conceded, ‘The results were great.’

Rib remodeling has emerged as an alternative to rib removal, a hotly contested procedure which multiple surgeons who spoke to the Daily Mail criticized.

‘Historically, when women had wanted a much narrower waistline, the way that they went about doing it was with rib removal,’ Beverly Hills double board-certified plastic surgeon Dr Josef Hadeed told the Daily Mail.

Dr Josef Hadeed has been performing the surgery for over a year

‘Our ribs are there to serve a function, which is to protect yourself, and by removing the ribs number one, you remove that protective function. But also, it created a little bit of an unnatural, almost sunken-in appearance to the waist.’

Rib remodeling, then, seems to be the new frontier. Hadeed, who said he was one of the first to offer the surgery on the West Coast, has been performing the procedure for over a year. He makes small incisions less than one centimeter in length in the skin and uses a specialized saw, equipped with a safety guard, to create fractures in the ribs.

‘We notice the difference right away on the operating room table,’ he said.

One of his patients, 33-year-old Jessica Lasher, had attempted non-invasive measures to shrink her waistline, but all the pilates and waist training in the world would not give her the physique she desired.

‘I have kind of a straight body. I’ve always been naturally quite thin, and I just wanted to have more shape,’ Lasher, an accountant and real estate investor, told the Daily Mail.

Removing ribs, however, was too ‘extreme,’ and she wanted to ‘keep all the bones in my body.’

Allen said she notices the results more in a waist trainer or form-fitting clothing

Lasher traveled from Vancouver, British Columbia to Beverly Hills, for the procedure, which is not yet offered in Canada

Lasher is pictured lacing up her waist trainer. The procedure, she said, ‘helped with my confidence’

So, in February, she traveled from Vancouver, British Columbia to Beverly Hills, for the procedure, which is not yet offered in Canada. She, however, did not experience the same level of pain as Allen, describing the feeling as if she had ‘the wind knocked out’ of her.

‘It’s really helped with my confidence, and it looks like I have more curves than I did before,’ she said.

Similarly, Samantha Garofalo, 43, said pulling her ribs inward to address her ‘boxy’ waist was the last resort when liposuction wasn’t enough.

The Chicago-based licensed massage therapist and esthetician underwent the $7,500 procedure in July. By the ninth day of recovery, she claims she was driving to her Botox appointments and taking her son to the movies. By six weeks, she says, she was totally ‘normal’ – and had shed five inches from her waist.

‘People say remodeling is crazy, you know, maybe it is, but I had a great experience with it,’ she said.

‘I don’t feel like it’s any crazier than breaking a nose for a nose job.’

Some experts beg to differ.

Dr Darren Smith believes it is too soon to determine just how safe the procedure is

Dr Darren Smith, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Manhattan, believes rib remodeling ‘has a lot of potential,’ but that it’s too soon to say just how much.

‘It is a very invasive procedure, and it’s just not something that we have a ton of great data on yet,’ he told the Daily Mail, noting safety risks involved with the ‘extreme’ surgery.

‘I find it really hard to justify an elective operation when there’s a real reported rate of chronic pain afterwards.’

The modern approach to rib remodeling emerged in 2017 in Russia, according to the New York Times, yet the more widely adopted technique, RibXcar, was only conceptualized in 2022 by Dr Raúl Manzaneda Cipriani in Peru. (Though, there are other approaches that yield similar results, such as the Riboss technique with osteosynthesis, which requires plates and screws to hold the bones in place.)

Smith called rib remodeling the ‘perfect social media operation’ – surgeries that yield drastic transformations with ‘high viral potential’ online. But Smith wonders: ‘Is it okay to do this from an ethical standpoint? And I don’t think there’s a clear answer there.’

Garofalo (pictured) underwent the $7,500 procedure in July this year

She lost five inches off of her waist as a result

Garofalo is pictured before and after the procedure

Hadeed brushed off such concerns, insisting that, because the operation ‘maintains the protective function of the ribs’ it is safer than total removal – so long as the surgeon is adequately trained.

‘With any new procedure, there’s always going to be some degree of skepticism and doubt about the efficacy of the procedure,’ said Hadeed.

‘Unfortunately, there are surgeons out there who just think that they can do it.’

NYC-based Sterry was also initially skeptical of rib remodeling. But 18 months ago, when he found himself in a lecture about the technique RibXcar, the alternative to total removal piqued his interest.

Dr Thomas Sterry, too, was initially skeptical. Now, he performs the surgery in Manhattan

He was concerned about the numerous risks that accompany the procedure, namely, chronic pain, impaired respiratory function, internal bleeding, and even a punctured or collapsed lung. But eventually, Sterry became more comfortable with the surgery.

‘If I’m doing, for instance, a deep-plane facelift, and I’m a hair’s breadth away from the facial nerve – that’s dangerous, that’s technical… [Rib remodeling] is just basic surgery, and it’s really not complicated whatsoever,’ he claimed.

In August, Philadelphia-based Shiqi Ma, 26, went to him to address her ‘flared ribs.’ She’s getting married next year and, she told the Daily Mail, wanted to ‘look better in [her] wedding dress.’

She whittled her waist down three inches, measuring now approximately 25 around.

‘I really do think it’s going to catch on now,’ Sterry said. ‘I suspect that ten years from now… Everybody’s gonna have to have this tool in the toolbox.’

Indeed, time will tell.

For now, a recent systemic review of 12 studies of rib remodeling procedures concluded: ‘Further high-quality studies, including randomized trials, are needed to inform surgical practices and patient decision-making regarding rib-based body contouring.’