Inside the World of Leg-Lengthening Surgery

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A growing number of men are undergoing a radical and expensive surgery to grow anywhere from three to six inches. The catch: It requires having both your femurs broken. GQ goes inside the booming world of leg lengthening.

John Lovedale is feeling pretty good, despite the fact that he should not be walking right now. It’s a little after 9 a.m. on a hot Saturday morning in Las Vegas and he’s ambling through the Aria Resort & Casino with a pronounced limp, wincing as he throws his hips into wide semicircles and dragging his feet exactly where they need to be. The effect is like a Grand Theft Auto extra who’s just been sniped in the butt. John is in his mid-40s and stands five feet eleven and a half. Big-hearted laugh. Built like a saguaro cactus. If you squint he kind of resembles a brolic Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s in town to see his orthopedic surgeon, having arrived last night from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he works as a network engineer for the government. He almost missed his flight and was in such a rush he forgot to bring the crutches he’s supposed to be using, but, again, he’s been feeling pretty good.

That John is on his feet at all is impressive—and probably foolish—considering that only eight months prior, he was five feet eight and a half. Back in September, he paid $75,000 for the agonizing privilege of having his legs surgically lengthened. That entailed having both his femurs broken, and adjustable metal nails inserted down their centers. Each nail is made of titanium, which is both flexible and sturdy, like bone, and about the size of a piccolo. The nails were extended one millimeter every day for about 90 days via a magnetic remote control. Once the broken bones heal, ta-da: a newer, taller John. With a procedure like this, there are, of course, some caveats. All the height gain obviously comes from your legs, so your proportions can look a little weird, especially when you’re naked. Also, the recovery can be long and taxing. When we meet, the bones in John’s legs are not yet fully healed, and a small section of his right femur is still a little soft, like al dente spaghetti; the smallest stumble could snap a bone in two. And it’s especially dangerous since he’s a big guy, over 200 pounds.

Then there’s the pain, which is relentless, ambient. The extension of the nails in his legs stretched the nerves and tissue around the bones—especially the thick, meaty muscles like the hamstrings—to an almost excruciating degree. He couldn’t walk for months. “They fill you with enough painkillers that it’s bearable,” John explains, but his biggest fear was becoming addicted to the drugs, so he weaned himself off the regimen earlier than he should have. Why would someone like John—handsome, confident, funny, a father to three—shell out for a procedure that costs more than a Tesla and results in months of agony for a couple of extra inches? It’s not like he was particularly short, at just shy of the average height of an American man (five feet nine). But the opportunity to be above average was too good to pass up. “I noticed that taller people just seem to have it easier,” John says, laughing. He shrugs. “The world seems to bend for them.”

It was last summer when, after a Google search, John was first swarmed by Facebook ads for the LimbplastX Institute, a clinic in Las Vegas founded in 2016 by Kevin Debiparshad—Dr. D, if you’re nasty—one of only a handful of surgeons in North America who perform cosmetic leg lengthening, and among the leading experts in the procedure. When I first called up Dr. D, he told me that business has been booming: Since the onset of the pandemic’s work-from-home era, the LimbplastX Institute has been seeing twice its normal number of patients, and sometimes as many as 50 new people a month. That claim is backed up by a BBC report suggesting that hundreds of men in the U.S. are now undergoing the procedure every year. On paper it makes sense. Stigmas around cosmetic surgery are fading, especially for men. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in 2019, male cosmetic procedures were up 29 percent from two decades prior.

https://www.gq.com/story/leg-lengthening

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[Anon-C]

1. Two good things about being short; the article mentions the leg room...

...and you get practical, life-time training in acceptance.

[milestogo]

2. I found the article really sad.

While I agree that its true that taller men have advantages - this does nothing to challenge that and everything to reinforce it. And it seems like there are a lot of risks for the patient.

[Anon-C]

6. I agree.

[Freddie]

3. Makes flying a lot easier

My 6’4” son-in-law is very uncomfortable on a plane. He’d rather drive 24 hrs to Florida than fly 3.

[milestogo]

4. Agreed.

I once was on a flight that had an entire college basketball team. All of the young men were well over 6 ft, and a couple were 7 ft tall. The school did not pay for them to fly first class, which might have been a little more comfortable.

But for most people, that's just an occasional inconvenience.

[Marcuse]

5. Less than $75K and no pain.

[Anon-C]

7. Ah, point taken.

[sdfernando]

8. So did these surgeons get their idea from Gattica? /NT

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10. I assume they got their ideas by popular demand.

The technology has been there for a long time. The fact that women feel free to change their faces and figures under the knife normalizes it.

It seems risky to have an elective procedure which requires an extended period of pain control. And there are lots of things which can go wrong, however rarely.

Breaking both legs on purpose, think of it. Seems to defy "First, do no harm."

[Earth-shine]

13. A few years ago, I saw a video about how this procedure was becoming popular in S. Korea.

The procedure may have originated from there.

[EYESORE 9001]

9. I'm 6'2" but have a 30" inseam

I used to do an act for my drunken friends where I would pull my pants down almost to my junk and then walk on exaggeratedly short legs like Popeye. ‘Torso Man’ was a big hit in its day. Having short legs also means having a low center of gravity - useful in street fighting/wrestling. After a couple of haymakers are thrown, fights generally become a wrestling match anyway.

[Earth-shine]

12. I'm 5'9" with a 30" inseem.

Pleased to meet you.