Some women—and men, since they get the procedure as well—are curious or worried about what a surgeon will put into their body during Brazilian butt lift surgery.
Plastic surgeons use a variety of implants and devices during various cosmetic surgical procedures, but none of them are used in a BBL.
Silicone implants are used in various breast, buttock, and facial plastic surgeries, and even lip augmentation can be done using them.
But a BBL, traditionally, never uses implants of any kind.
It uses only your own healthy fat, extracted from parts of your body where there’s enough of it, and inserted into your buttocks where there’s too little of it for your liking.
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What Goes Inside?
- Fat. Fat taken from a patient’s own body is safely re-injected into the buttocks. Simply speaking, fat is really the only thing put in your body in order to produce the results of a Brazilian butt lift.
- Anesthesia. Since the majority of Brazilian butt lift surgeries are done under general anesthesia, that, too, is injected into the patient’s body prior to surgery. Without it (or local anesthesia is less invasive cases), the procedure would be so unbearably painful as to be impossible. Patients can be allergic to anesthesia, so a board-certified anesthesiologist is advised, and a patient may wish to ask about this.
- Stainless steel. A cannula (tube) made of stainless steel is used to suction out the necessary fat, and another cannula is used to re-inject that fat into the buttocks.
- Blood. Some blood inevitably mixes with the fat to be injected, so it comes along too.
- Saline. Saline, a sterile saltwater solution, is mixed with the extracted fat during the process of sterilizing the fat needed to enlarge your buttocks.
- No implants, no plastic, no silicone. Importantly, no plastic, silicone, or implants are put in the patient’s body during Brazilian butt lift surgery. Only a patient’s own fat is left behind after a BBL.
The only thing placed inside of a patient’s body during BBL surgery is the patient’s own body fat.
The instrument used to place the fat within the patient’s buttocks is a surgical tube or straw, known as a cannula. That cannula is made of stainless steel and it’s sterilized before each surgery (or it should be, and is at most properly-conducted surgical suites).
A stainless steel cannula is also used to extract fat from other parts of a patient’s body during the liposuction portion of the BBL procedure.
Both cannulas are made of stainless steel, but the cannula used to inject the fat is much wider in diameter than the cannula used to extract the fat out during liposuction.
This fact ensures the procedure is safer, since the wider cannula would have a more difficult time puncturing blood vessels. When the larger blood vessels of the buttocks are punctured during the fat injecting part of a BBL (usually without a surgeon’s knowledge), the injected fat can travel to the heart or lungs and cause death.
Aside from these stainless steel cannulas, nothing is placed inside of a patient’ body during Brazilian butt lift surgery.
No implants, no silicone, no plastic
That means that no implants, silicone, plastic, or any other device is left inside of the patient’s body.
Once the surgeon has completed his job, nothing other than fat remains in the patient’s body.
More specifically, however, for those interested, the fat injected is never fat alone.
Tumescent fluid, blood, water, and other bodily liquids go along with that fat into the buttocks, though most of the non-fat contents that were liposuctioned out of the body are removed during a process known as filtration.
These non-fat carry alongs are then absorbed or processed by the body.
Their presence in the body won’t cause any complications, but if the injected fat has been poorly prepared (and too much of the non-fat content remains), it may cause your BBL results to look good immediately after surgery, only to look much flatter or deflated within a few days.
Some swelling after a BBL is totally normal, and so is the presence of some of the non-fat items including blood and other fluid, but care should be taken by your surgeon to properly prepare the fat prior to injecting it into the buttocks.
Anesthesia
Brazilian butt lifts are done under general anesthesia, which means that some form of anesthetic is injected into the body to ensure you feel no pain or discomfort during the procedure.
Anesthesia is one of the more important aspects of any plastic surgical procedures, and its often not given the attention it deserves.
While patients should probably always ensure they see a board-certified plastic surgeon—or at least understand what these boards represent, and what doctors are or are not members—they should also be aware of who is handling the anesthesia required in their operation.
They, too, should be board-certified.
