A new plastic surgery trend in Japan alters the palm lines of your hand — and potentially your fate.
According to a report by Jake Adelstein and Nathalie-Kyoko Stucky in The Daily Beast, palmistry enthusiasts are asking surgeons to extend or create lines in their hand with an electric scalpel to increase their luck.
One such Japanese surgeon is Takaaki Matsuoka, who was first asked to perform the procedure by a patient in 2011. Having never heard of such a thing, he was able to find examples of the surgery in Korea, where patients' flesh was cut and burned to leave a semi-permanent scar on the hand.
Matsuoka's clinic has since performed 37 of these procedures, according to The Daily Beast. The entire process takes 10 to 15 minutes with as many as 10 lines on the palm altered at a time, plus a subsequent month to recover. The total cost is $1,000.
The majority of Matsuoka's patients are men and women in their 30s who strongly believe in fortune telling. He told Adelstein and Stucky that men tend to favor lines that predict money or success, whereas women request their love and marriage lines to be altered.
And although Matsuoka confessed to The Daily Beast that he didn't believe the surgery actually affected his patients' luck, he did say the feedback has been positive with a few former patients even reporting marriage proposals or winning the lottery.
"If people think they’ll be lucky, sometimes they become lucky," he said. "And it’s not like the palm lines are really written in stone — they’re basically wrinkles."
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