How Many Ribs Would You Break for a Smaller Waist?

In the late '80s, a tabloid that Cher had undergone a risky rib removal surgery to narrow her waistline. The icon, fresh off her Oscar-winning role in Moonstruck, denied the allegation. Two years later, she was said to have hired a British doctor to examine her body and corroborate her truth, but the rumors were never quite put to rest. Even now, in the reporting of this story, several surgeons alluded to the speculation, though not one believes she actually altered her ribs.

I began investigating cosmetic rib surgery after a trusted plastic surgeon informed me that the procedure, long regarded as sheer curiosity or urban legend, has become something more  This doctor wasn’t pitching me as a purveyor of the procedure, angling for press. Rather, he presented the idea as a sort of PSA after hearing, secondhand, of a patient in a coma, purportedly due to a complication from a rib reshaping operation. As of yet, Allure has been unable to substantiate the coma claim (our source confirmed with three different people who have knowledge of the matter that a plastic surgeon's rib patient wound up in an ICU in