While browsing through social media and channels like NatGeo, you may have seen how women of certain African tribes wear huge rings on their necks to elongate them further. This is considered a sign of great beauty and one woman from LA decided that she too wanted to do the same.
Sydney Smith was a modern day Giraffe woman. She spent 5 years trying to add heavy metal rings around her neck in hopes to elongate her neck like a giraffe but now she’s given up the idea because “logic kicked in”.
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Sydney Smith 30 was obsessed with this weird sense of body modification after reading about the Kayan Lahwi tribes of Thailand and Burma where girls as young as 15 elongated their necks with heavy metal rings to look like giraffes.
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Sydney says “I’ve always had a long neck,” In middle school; they called me ‘giraffe girl.’ She admitted how she says photos of long-necked tribal women in National Geographic magazines and that’s when her obsession set in.
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Sydney drew her inspiration from the Kenyan people in South East Asia and even went as far as making her own custom set of rings which she would wear for five years. It was made up of 15 rings and it weighed 15 pounds.
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Why Sydney chose to become like that is unknown but it seems she was driven by some fascination seeing the African ring tradition as her perspective of beauty. She was soon to be known as the Giraffe woman.
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When she was a teen she would wrap coat hangers around her neck before going to bed at night. For a short time, she had stopped because it made her wonder whether she really wanted to do this to her body.
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But in 2011, she again began her quest purchasing a tight-fitting copper necklace that pushed down her collarbone. For the next five years, Sydney added more rings around her neck and did not remove them even while sleeping. They stayed on even during the day she was soon known as the giraffe woman, a name she had given herself.
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There came a time when she had 15 rings soldered around her neck which weighed 5 pounds. However finally today reason has set in and she has given up her quest. She would not like to be the Giraffe woman anymore.
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“I couldn’t function properly as a long neck woman with 15 rings around my neck in the United States of America,” I spent five years of my life with rings around my neck and I just became very introverted and isolated and felt like the rings were taking over my life in every way, “Sydney said.
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It seems that the rings were ultimately weighing her down. Her daily routines became harder to function and she wasn’t exactly an heiress. It’s ok to carry out a fad on a night out but to try and integrate something as bizarre as that in your daily life is ridiculous.
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Fortunately for Sydney, she soon began to see reason and contemplated on quitting the rings. She said 'Unless you are willing to completely isolate yourself and you're a trust fund baby and don't ever need to leave the house, don't ever need to drive, then maybe you can pull it off”. And that’s exactly what she did because she decided, she had had enough. The rings would soon be off her neck.
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Sydney admits that the rings were taking over her personality and that she began losing focus on who she really was. According to her, “logic kicked in".
She now visits a physical therapist several times a week to help restore normalcy around her neck and remove the stiffness caused by the rings. Thankfully she says doctors feel there hasn’t been any permanent damage and she should recover quickly. Somehow she says, as the giraffe woman, she had no regrets in doing what she did because the weight of the rings on her neck and shoulders gave her a peculiar sense of security and comfort.
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Even doctors are shocked at how fast her neck has recovered from the trauma of elongation. Smith’s neck looks normal as you can see and she is back to her beautiful self. It isn’t usual for people to do such things and hopefully, her story will be a lesson to all.
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