Thailand has earned a reputation for unusual cosmetic surgeries. Now, a clinic known for procedures such as breast augmentation has gone viral for a more unique thing: changing the pigmentation of a penis to make it lighter.
An employee at Bangkok’s Lelux Hospital wrote a Facebook post promoting the procedure, which in turn garnered close to 20,000 shares and over 100,000 comments, mostly by amused or baffled social media users, Newsweek reports.
The post was accompanied by a video showing a man lying on the table in a clinic as a doctor seemed to perform the whitening laser procedure. The video has been viewed over four million times as of Thursday.
Atittayapa Photiya, the clinic employee who wrote the post, said,
No pain, no need to recover.
Photiya previously sparked social media discussions on another of the clinic’s procedures, the so-called 3D vagina. This operation involved injecting a patient’s own fats into her mons pubis to produce a pronounced, plumper look. The same employee also shared a post talking about a laser whitening procedure for female genitals, though this received less attention.
In other parts of the world, a tanned look is the preferred option, but in countires such as Thailand, the trend is to make one’s skin whiter. This is usually achieved through laser procedures or whitening products. Many of these have come under fire for promoting racism, such as a commercial in January 2016 with the slogan, “Whiteness makes you win.”
The Lelux Hospital began offering the penis-whitening procedure six months ago after one client complained that his groin had dark pigmentation. The clinic has since performed the laser procedure on dozens of patients.
Bunthita Wattanasiri, a manager for the Skin and Laser department at Lelux Hospital, said, “These days a lot of people are asking about it. We get around 100 clients a month, three to four clients a day.”
The whitening process takes several sessions to complete, and costs around $155 each.
