Please appreciate this 44-year-old female following high-definition liposuction 360 with BBL as a butt implant alternative.
Today, there is a definite butt implant alternative for buttock augmentation. Even though I have been placing buttock implants for well over a decade, I feel that the advances in fat harvesting techniques have made using butt implants obsolete.
Traditionally, butt implants were recommended for patients who felt not to have adequate body fat. This recommendation was made since traditional fat harvesting techniques yield less fat than more advanced, energy-based techniques.
One to two liters of fat volume is typically needed to transfer following tumescent solution infiltration and subsequent aspiration. Additionally, infiltration and aspiration volume ratios are usually one-to-one. This ratio constraint means that if we infiltrate 5L of the tumescent solution, we can expect to remove approximately 5L of fat and fluids.
This amount of removed fat and fluid is then processed to wash and remove the fluid before being grafted. Typically, 1/3rd to 1/4th of the total removed fat and fluid volume results in injectable fat. This means out of 5L of fat aspirate removed; we can expect only 1.5L of fat that can be used in the above case. What is sobering is that 5 L of infiltration and aspiration volume is the maximum allowable amount in an outpatient setting using traditional liposuction techniques.
Assuming that this fat volume is evenly grafted into each buttock with half of the volume being injected into each buttock, we realize that only 750cc of fat can be transferred into each buttock cheek. Unfortunately, thin patients typically lack fat donor sites and thus are limited in the amount of fat volume that can be transferred.
As a result, patients who have less than 10% of body fat are often turned away by physicians as they are told they lack adequate fat volume. Instead, they are advised to consider undergoing a butt implant procedure alternative.
Fortunately, with ultrasound-assisted liposuction, fat harvesting has been revolutionized. This is because the VASER machine, the gold standard in ultrasound-assisted technology, can harvest up to 40% faster than traditional techniques. This is because of its proprietary capability to remove superficial and deep fat. Although the same maximum of lipoaspirate is removed, the ratio of fat in the aspirate available for transfer is much greater. Thus it results in much higher fat volumes transferred.
This is in contrast to traditional liposuction, which was limited to deep fat only. In the case of a patient with less than 10% body fat, their fat depositions are preferentially located in the superficial fat. Even though the superficial fat is not as prominent, using 360 or circumferential liposuction using VASER technology will allow for modest volumes of fat to be harvested.
What Is The Butt Implant Alternative?
As such, Brazilian Butt Lifts can be offered to athletic patients or those with less than 10% body fat as a butt implant alternative. Let us consider a case study involving a patient with less than 10 to 5 % body fat and weighing less than 100 pounds. She was offered 360 liposuctions with infiltration volumes of, for example, 5 Liters of volume.
However, unlike the routine patient, where 1/3rd to 1/4th of the aspirate is realized as transferrable fat, low body fat patients demonstrate 1/8th of the body fat. So in the above example, we recovered approximately 625cc of fat. Although this was not a generous amount of fat, it still provided over 300cc of transferrable fat into each buttock cheek. In a patient weighing less than 100 pounds and possessing a small torso with less than 5% body fat, 300cc of fat transfer to the buttock was adequate and generous.
In summary, a Brazilian butt lift is now a butt implant alternative procedure. With the advent of VASER technology, fat transfer can now be offered as a butt implant alternative to even thin and athletic women.
