What is a Brazilian Butt Lift?
The Brazilian Butt Lift, a BBL, has become the fastest-growing cosmetic surgery in the United States. Although the name Brazilian Butt Lift connotates a cosmetic lifting procedure, it is a filling procedure, not a lift! A Brazilian Butt Lift surgery represents the buttock's augmentation and reshaping with fat transfer. An alternative to the buttock enhancement surgical procedure with fat transfer is the buttock augmentation procedure with a silicone implant. In the later surgical option, a silicone implant is positioned over the central buttock region within the gluteus maximus muscle in the later plastic surgery procedure. Whereas the BBL procedure allows for augmentation and reshaping of the entire buttock cheek and even the lateral hips, buttock implant augmentation is limited to the central buttock cheek only.
A complex procedure, several measures must be taken to optimize the Brazilian Butt Lift results. These measures include preoperative preparation, following specific intraoperative protocols, and complying with postoperative instructions, and using a Board-Certified Plastic Surgeon with specialized training. These measures are advocated to ensure maximum fat cell viability and maintain gained results.
Preoperative Planning for a Brazilian Butt Lift
Preoperative planning is the first step in preparing for your Brazilian Butt Lift. Since you will undergo surgery, you should optimize your health and healing potential. This starts with optimizing your protein intake by consuming at least 150 grams of protein per day. Optimizing protein intake will ensure that your blood protein, called albumin is normal to high, thus preventing unnecessary leakage of fluid from the vessels into the soft tissues. Limiting soft tissue swelling is critical to ensuring fat cell viability since fat cells rely on the diffusion of nutrients for survival. Excess fluid around the cell will prevent the cell from receiving nutrients. Another benefit of optimizing protein levels is that you will have adequate capacity to heal incisions such as port sites or even longer surgical incisions, for example, should excisional surgery, such as a lateral thigh and buttock tuck, be needed. Final planning for any cosmetic surgery procedure involves making preparations for ample recovery time where your activity levels can be limited. Activity restrictions may extend up to one month after surgery until healing is completed. This means taking time off work and having appropriate assistance following surgery.
Surgical planning is another important component of a successful Brazilian Butt Lift. To begin with, all of your body mass fat stores must be identified so that your buttock and your body can be maximally contoured. Another reason to take inventory of the fat tissues is to ensure that adequate fat stores will be available to accomplish your desired BBL goals. Finally, communicating your desired buttock look is best achieved by using our Brazilian Buttock Assessment Tool. The Brazilian Buttock Assessment Tool allows patients to choose between several altered buttock shapes and sizes for their body type using caricatures.
Choose your ideal buttock size and shape using the Brazilian Buttock Assessment Tool Today.
Intraoperative Protocols for Brazilian Butt Lift
Intraoperative protocols have been designed to optimize Brazilian Butt Lift results by optimizing fat graft viability. Fat transfer procedure measures include:
- Use of VASER liposuction to harvest fat cells during a Brazilian butt-lift procedure. VASER liposuction allows for optimized body contouring and harvests single-cell fat tissues that optimize fat graft take.
- Limiting the negative pressure exposure intensity on the fat cells during fat harvesting and injecting during a Brazilian butt-lift. Pressure can harm cells just like if you are a scuba diver, you can get the bends from being exposed to higher underwater pressure changes. Using a closed-loop system with controlled fat expression and delivery roller allows your surgeon to avoid unnecessary pressure created by using traditional syringes.
- Fat transfer techniques minimize transplant or out-of-body time to less than 30 minutes. Out-of-body time describes the delay from when the fat cells are sucked out of your body to the point when they are reinjected. The use of the closed loop canister system will help you autotransplant the fat cells in a prompt manner, thus optimizing fat graft take.
- Fat cell contamination and infection can be minimized using a closed-loop and an antibiotic irrigation system. Processing fat cells requires removing the liquid portion of the aspirate to compact the fat cells. Meanwhile, the fat cells must be washed with antibiotic irrigation to minimize the risk of infection. Both of these precautions for the fat tissues are accomplished using the closed-loop canister system.
- Optimize the contour of the rest of your body so that your buttock enhancement surgery is harmonious with improving your body contour. First, VASER liposuction is utilized since ultrasound energy can remove fat uniformly and comprehensively so that you can appreciate high-definition body contouring results. Second, a skin tone supplement may be needed to achieve high-definition Brazilian Buttock Lift surgery outcomes. When minimal to moderate sagging is present, the Renuvion J plasma skin tightening tool can be utilized. This skin tightening modality eliminates skin laxity of the back, flanks, lateral thighs, and buttocks without requiring an incision line. If moderate to severe buttocks sagging excess skin is present, a more invasive lateral thigh tucking procedure may be considered to eliminate either lower back and flank or lateral thigh loose skin redundancy. These skin contouring procedures are performed simultaneously with your VASER liposuction to achieve high definition Brazilian Buttock Lift surgery outcomes. In summary, sculpting and contouring of the entire back, buttocks, and legs are required to achieve superior buttocks-shaping results.
Complying with Postoperative Brazilian Butt Lift Instructions
Following your Brazilian Buttocks lift, you will awaken from general anesthesia and find yourself wrapped with customized compression garments with foam inlays. You may also have some drains that you will need to care for. One of the biggest myths regarding the Brazilian buttock lift is the required use of a special pillow. Cosmetic surgeons who advocate using specialized pillows likely have a higher incidence of buttock volume loss. On the contrary, buttock volume loss is not due to not sitting on a special pillar but rather due to poor surgical technique, suboptimal surgical protocols, or poor compliance postoperatively. Instead, patients should be enumerated in the appropriate postoperative protocols. These include avoiding sitting in any one position for more than an hour.
Specifically, sitting upright is entirely safe as this involves sitting on your lower hip bone, called the ischium, where no fat is transferred. Patients must be cognizant of when they sit on a couch or while sleeping when they would put weight on their central buttocks cheek. Patients must realize that cells will tolerate up to one hour of pressure without fat necrosis. As such, we teach our Brazilian Buttocks Lift patients modified positions and to move from each side to their back continually. When you sleep, your body automatically will turn for you, so don't worry. An exciting concept we convey is that your skin is more sensitive to pressure necrosis or death than your fat cells. So if you were to mess up and convey prolonged harmful pressure on any given area on your buttock, you would observe skin loss before the fat loss. Just so you know – a final precaution you must consider revolves around minimizing unnecessary swelling. The first measure is to ensure continued intake of a balanced diet high in protein, and the second is to wear compression garments. Excessive swelling of the soft tissues of the buttock will result in your fat cells being unable to get their nutrients through diffusion. This is because when your plastic surgeon transfers fat cells, they have no direct access to blood vessels for the first 5 to 7 days following transplantation.
