DR. RICARDO L. RODRIGUEZ
Board-Certified, American Board of Plastic Surgery
Founder, Ricardo L. Rodriguez MD, Baltimore Plastic Surgeon
Medical Director, Cosmetic Surgery Facility, LLC
Patients contemplating a Brazilian butt lift procedure should be aware of the risks, specifically the risk of PFE, and should consider the following to minimize the risk involved. As a BBL patient, you should be sure to:
Your BMI, or Body Mass Index, plays a big role in surgical complication risk assessment. All cosmetic surgery patients should have a BMI assessment prior to surgery. The BMI is a number that compares your weight to your height. High BMI’s create higher surgical risks.
Patients with a BMI less than 35 are typically good candidates for the Tummy Tuck and BBL. However, every surgeon has a different guideline for what is the acceptable BMI for an elective surgery.
Many doctors on Instagram take their photos right on the operating room table. This is NOT an accurate representation of what the result will be. For starters, plastic surgeons inject tumescent solution into the buttocks, and this fluid will make the buttocks appear bigger on the operating room table. That solution will dissolve later. In addition, photos taken on the Operating Room table have the patient facing down. This positioning will give the appearance of hips larger than what they will be when standing upright.
I have been performing the Brazilian butt lift for almost a decade. With this procedure, I remove fat from unwanted areas and then reinject into your buttocks. Patients are now doing so much research , that I often get the question about how much fat is injected into the buttocks. To answer the question, I looked at my last 100 procedures to find out the average amount of fat which is injected per patient, per buttock cheek. Before I give you the answer, you should know that the final amount injected will NOT be the amount which is removed. The amount reinjected will only be a fraction of the amount of fat which I have removed. I only keep the ‘good fat’ . The rest of the fat contains dead cells, blood, and other components that will *not* help the fat survive.
A lot of surgeons now are beginning to perform Brazilian butt lifts. Fat grafting is highly technique dependent and some surgeons are having more success than others. Unfortunately most surgeons do not see other surgeon’s work so it is hard for them to compare results. But you can. The information you can get from these questions will help you pick the best surgeon for yourself!
In 2007, I wrote a blog post about Hydrogel for Buttock augmentation. In the post I detailed my reasons why I did not think it was a good idea to do a Buttock augmentation or Butt Lift with Hydrogel. The only thing that has changed since I wrote that post is that I have seen many patients who have suffered terrible damage from Hydrogel injections! My position remains the same: Hydrogel to buttocks: Don’t do it! To recap.
Why does the butt look lifted in a BBL?
It’s all about how the eye perceives shapes. When you look at the back of a typical woman what you think is the butt is really a combination of two separate fat pockets:
The combination of the two fat volumes creates a visual unit. It is longer than it is wide so the butt appears to be droopy or sagging. From the side it appears there is no shelf but a long slope that makes the buttock look like it is hanging. If you eliminate the back muffin top above the buttock there are a lot of perception changes that result.
“Can I have another procedure at the same time as the Brazilian butt lift?” The answer is yes and no. A Tummy tuck can be safely combined with the Brazilian butt lift to give a great result. However, combining the butt lift with breast aug is usually not advisable. Watch this video by Dr. Ricardo Rodriguez, a Yale trained Plastic Surgeon.
Dr. Ricardo Rodriguez, a Yale trained Plastic Surgeon, explains what happens when you lose weight after a Brazilian butt lift procedure. Do you lose some of your new augmented buttocks or does the fat graft survive? Watch his video which profiles a Brazilian butt lift patient who lost weight following her Brazilian butt lift surgery.
The year 2010 ushers in a new decade where science , beauty, and your own fat make a marriage that promises to deliver one of the most disruptive medical technologies of the century. Dr. Ricardo Rodriguez, a Yale trained Plastic Surgeon believes that stem cells from your own fat will lead the cosmetic surgery trends.
Fat injections are long lasting if done correctly. That is my position and I stand by it! If you frequent various plastic surgery blogs, there is a big difference in the types of techniques that surgeons are using. Thus, there is a wide variation in their results, so many patients think that fat injections do not last. Fat injections are permanent if the following is done:
During the past decade, researchers have discovered that stem cells can also be extracted from your own fat tissue. These adult stem cells have the same potential as embryonic stem cells, except for the ability to differentiate into sperm or ova. Unlike embryonal stem cells, stem cells extracted from your own fat are abundant, easily available, and pose no ethical or political controversy.
Dr. Rodriguez’s Brazilian butt lift technique is featured in the Washington DC – Baltimore spring issue of the Women’s Journal.
I did my first case of micro fat grafting to the face over 20 years ago. It was a patient that had acne scarring in her face. During the decade of the 90’s I had tried laser for that problem, under the theory that you could level the skin.
Frankly the results were OK, not great, because the pits were not filled. Fat grafting was used to fill the pits under the skin. The great surprise was how good the skin looked after the fat injections ! The skin became rosier, softer, and just younger looking.
Dr. Ricardo Rodriguez explains why the recovery period for the Brazilian butt lift is 3 weeks. If you sit sooner than that it can prevent some of the fat grafts from surviving. Sitting during the recovery period is harmful to the new fat grafts because it exerts a tremendous crushing pressure, up to 400 pounds per square inch in some areas, on these tender cells and tissues. Even the areas that are not crushed are under such pressure that blood flow is shut off.
