“You desire to look beautiful from the outside,” doctor Sejal Desai’s website tells potential clients. “Now you can choose to look beautiful from the inside too.”
The photographs of vaginas that cover one wall of Desai’s consulting room in Sarla Hospital in the Mumbai suburb of Santacruz illustrate exactly what she means. Each picture bears a tag: “before” or “after.”
Potential clients “look at the photos and start opening up,” said Desai.
What they open up about is their desire to have “designer vaginas” of the sort Desai has depicted on the wall and on her website.
To help clients get from “before” to “after,” Desai, who claims to be India’s first “aesthetic vaginal surgeon,” offers a range of procedures.
She performs complicated surgeries to unhood the clitoris and remove or trim the vaginal labia. She surgically reshapes the labia majora, the externally visible portions of the vulva, to create a single-creased vagina free of wrinkles. She tightens vaginas “for enhanced sexual arousal and pleasure or to correct age-related sagging and wrinkles which need to be lifted and filled.”
Some vaginal surgeries allow women to achieve what Desai calls the “Barbie look.” She explained: “Barbie look is like having the vagina of a newborn.”