While American women are using everything from needles to shot glasses in efforts to plump our lips to Kylie-Jenner like proportions, there are women overseas who are actually getting surgery to make their lips smaller. *Gasp* We stumbled upon this pretty gruesome shot of a lip procedure done by Dr. Apple Cosmetic Surgery in Thailand thanks to Instagram’s Explore page.

Let’s just say the Frankenstein-like mouth stitches really grossed us out. So much so, we had to know more. BET.com couldn’t get in touch with this particular practice, so we reached out to a couple of expert plastic surgeons on this side of the globe to give us the scoop.

“I would call this a lip reduction. The goal is to decrease the amount of volume in the lip and to enhance lip definition,” says Dr. Melissa Doft of Doft Plastic Surgery in New York City. When asked if it was painful (because it looks pretty painful) she says it is “for the first few days and then well tolerated.”

You’re looking at about a week of recovery time for something like this. Dr. Doft advises patients to eat soft foods during this period to avoid trauma to the area, especially since the lips are very sensitive and packed with nerve endings.

WeTV’s Dr. Miami has a different approach than what’s pictured above, where the incision is made on the inside of the lip so you don’t see a scar. Although he hasn’t done a lip reduction in about 10 years since there’s no demand for it, that definitely sounds like the better option.

“It’s not popular in America. I mean, lip reductions have been around for a long time, it’s just not that popular as of late because big lips are in. If anything it’s the opposite — people are like, ‘Make my lips bigger.’ Not smaller. Maybe it’s a cultural thing. Like maybe in Europe and South East Asia, people want smaller lips,” explains Snapchat’s favorite plastic surgeon.

He estimates that a procedure like this typically runs about $3,500, and there’s no going back, literally,  because “the scar tissue underneath will make it so you can never quite get back that fullness you had before.” While you won't see Dr. Miami doing any lip reductions on his new reality show, you will catch the doc working on another set of lips.

“The only lip work I do on the show is labia lips, you know, on the vagina. Those lips are very popular. I worked on Sky from Black Ink Crew. I was just on her show a couple months ago. So we trim [the labia]. One side can have extra skin. It gets stretched out whether by genetics or over time, so we trim it and make it look pretty.”

Say what? So many lip surgeries, we can’t even keep up anymore.