How do you get a lift in a Brazilian butt lift?

I get this question asked often, “How do I get a lift in the Brazilian butt lift?”. The patient will then push her own buttock up to help me understand what she wants. They ask me, “Can you do it?” I have answered this so often, it is time to write about it here on our blog.

How do I get a lift in the Brazilian Butt Lift?

The Brazilian butt lift is a type of Butt augmentation performed with your own fat injections. As a matter of fact, in this procedure the butt is physically lifted very little, if at all. But after a Brazilian Butt Lift, the buttock definitely looks perky, and definitely looks lifted!

How does this happen?

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:

  1. the buttock itself, and sitting right above it
  2. the flank, or “muffin top” fat pocket

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 that extra fat pocket above the buttock there are a lot of perception changes that result.

Brazilian butt lift before & after back view

A collage of photos (back view) of a patient before and after a Brazilian butt lift procedure.

As you see in this first picture above, the butt on the left (preoperative view) looks like a long droopy oval. On the right (postoperative view) you see the perky bubble butt, because the flank fat pad, or muffin top, has been eliminated and you are seeing the rounded, shorter buttock contrasted against a narrow waist.

So instead of having two fat pats joining to form a long rectangle or oval, you get a rounded buttock contrasted against a narrow waist. This is an improvement in the waist to hip ratio which is also an important esthetic marker.

Brazilian butt lift before & after side view

A collage of photos (side view) of a patient before and after a Brazilian butt lift procedure.

And on this side view photo above, the arrow shows that the apparent length of the buttock on the left is much longer than the buttock on the right! So the buttock looks shorter and rounder, not long and droopy. Furthermore, when the patient looks at the slope of her back and butt (before) it looks almost like a straight line, so the patient thinks she has little or no butt. This is because the flank fat pad is hiding the buttock shelf from her view.

The Brazilian butt Lift works so well because by eliminating the fat above the buttock it creates a shelf. By just adding a little fat at the buttock there is a radical change in the slope from her lower back to shelf.

If you look closely at the bottom of the butt, you can also see the butt has not been lifted at all. There is no lift, but there is a real dramatic change and the butt is perkier, rounder, and prettier, a bubble butt, as if by magic. Maybe it should called the Brazilian magical butt instead of the Brazilian butt lift?! Then again, what’s in a name?

By Dr. Ricardo L. Rodriguez MD Board Certified Plastic Surgeon Cosmeticsurg Baltimore, Maryland Ricardo L. Rodriguez on American Society of Plastic Surgeons.

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