How the Brazilian Butt Lift Became One of the Deadliest Cosmetic Surgeries
Inadequate regulations make it hard for patients to tell if they are getting a good doctor or a quack.
Photographer: Steph Davidson, Getty
By Fiona Rutherford
July 18, 2022, 10:30 PM GMT+8
A few days after undergoing cosmetic surgery, Chelsea was in a Philadelphia emergency room with what looked like a third-degree burn. The skin around her thighs had turned black, hardened and blistered. The burning sensation was so intense she was struggling to breathe.
Chelsea, 29, had undergone an increasingly popular cosmetic procedure called a Brazilian butt lift, where fat is liposuctioned from one part of the body — usually the abdomen or thighs — and then injected into the buttocks in hopes of giving the patient an hourglass figure.
“I was hoping to do a mommy makeover and it turned into a complete nightmare,” said Chelsea, who did not want to use her last name for fear of hurting her career prospects. Before the surgery, she was studying to become a nurse. These days, she can’t sit without experiencing a burning sensation.
The Brazilian butt lift is among the most dangerous aesthetic procedures. In 2017 it had the highest death rate of any cosmetic surgery in the US, according to a group of leading clinical plastic surgery societies. Patients have been left paralyzed as a result of the surgery, or experience long-term pain due to nerve damage. A taskforce that looked into the high death rate with Brazilian butt lifts found that about 3% of surgeons had experienced a patient death after the procedure.
Despite this, as curvy celebrity influencers like the Kardashians fill social media feeds, Brazilian butt lifts have only grown more popular. Globally, butt augmentation — including silicone implants — was a $1.5 billion market in 2020, according to Grand View Research, which projects the market will grow 22% a year and reach $6.6 billion by 2028. In recent years, the number of surgeries has “increased dramatically,” said Lina Triana, president-elect of the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. In 2020, more than 40,000 butt lifts were performed by certified plastic surgeons in the US, twice as many as five years prior, according to ISAPS's latest statistics.
Source:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...socialflow-twitter-business&utm_medium=social
