“The labia minora have a function,” she says—a fact that patients don’t always seem to recognize. If too much tissue is removed, the patient can experience chronic vaginal discharge, irritation, chafing, and debilitating pain. And worst of all, this is a problem with no easy solution; one of plastic surgery’s foundation principles is that it’s relatively easy to remove tissue from a body but extremely hard to add it back in. For this reason, when Preminger performs labiaplasties, she steers patients away from the “Barbie vagina” aesthetic that might create a medical issue where none previously
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