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!
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 buttock itself
- the flank, or “back muffin top” above the buttocks
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.
Brazilian butt lift before & after back view
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 pads 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
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. When you also add fat to the hips and buttocks there is a radical change in the slope from her lower back to shelf.
(originally published September 7, 2012)
