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Butt Augmentation

Fat can be used as a “filler” as well. Fat grafting involves taking fat from one area of your body and transferring it to another. Common areas to be filled are the cheek, lip, buttock, hands, and irregularities from prior liposuction work.

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What Is Fat Grafting?

Fat grafting is not new. We have used fat as a soft tissue filler for years. The initial issue with fat grafting was poor survival of the newly moved fat. When you take fat from one area of the body, like your abdomen, and put it in a new area, like your buttock, the fat needs to get a new blood supply to survive. Fat cells are live cells. They need oxygen and nutrients brought to them by the blood to survive. Once in a new place, your body will develop new blood vessels to those cells over time. The critical time is those first few days.

What happens if fat dies? Fat will do one of three things: melt away, harden, or form calcifications. We plastic surgeons have refined our techniques. We harvest the fat more gently with special cannulas (tubes). We have studied the fat cells after harvest to see what we need to do to make the fat cells as healthy as possible to transfer. We learned to transfer the fat in teeny tiny cannulas and amounts, essentially seeding the area with new fat, not doing large pools of fat. Particularly when grafting large volumes of fat, there can be higher rates of loss. Avoiding pressure on the newly transferred fat, doing “micro” transfer of the fat to spread it out, and trying to improve blood supply all help the newly moved fat live.

"She has gone above and beyond what any other doctor would have done to give me a good result." - D.B., San Francisco
*Individual results may vary
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Brazilian Buttock Lift

The Brazilian Buttock Lift, is done using your own fat to increase the size or shape your buttock. Fat transfer to the buttock is a procedure done in the operating room, usually with liposuction to the flank area. There are other ways to do buttock augmentation which involve buttock implants, but I am not in favor of putting in a foreign object when fat works well. The purpose of fat grafting to the buttock is to shape and sculpt the area. As you age, your bottom droops and the skin loosens, just as your breasts do. This can cause loss of shape, giving many women a flat, wide, droopy look to the buttock. Strategically placed fat can help lift and shape the bottom, smooth out indents or wrinkles, or add volume if you desire. The fat is harvested from another site on the body using sterile technique and then centrifuged to concentrate, make uniform, and get rid any poor fat cells.

I love fat grafting. For larger volume areas like the buttock, fat grafting is a good option if you have enough fat. You get the bonus of sculpting the areas around the buttock, and are using your own natural tissue to enhance the area. Unlike the face, I need a fair amount of harvested fat volume to give visible change. Do you have enough fat? How is your skin tone in those areas? Some of my patients are too thin, so I have few sites to harvest the fat from. For those with poor skin tone, when removing enough fat for the transfer, it may leave the liposuctioned area with loose skin. This is something I assess with you when I meet you at your first visit. Your results will be related to how much fat is injected, and what the survival of that fat is.