The New York Times
09/01/2021 13:05
Clarín.com
Good Life
Updated 09/01/2021 1:31 PM
The perfect body, in Diana Dayyani's opinion, belongs to a cartoon character.
Not just any animated character, not Vilma Flintstones, not Betty Rubble, but a rabbit: Jessica Rabbit.
"
I love that hourglass look,
" says Dayyani, 23, of Houston.
"The small waist, the nice and pleasant hips."
Dayyani was so in love with Rabbit's physique that in April she decided to get it for herself.
He enlisted the statuesque help of Dr. Patrick Hsu, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Houston.
He proposed a
breast reduction ($ 7,400) and a buttock augmentation
, or Brazilian butt augmentation (BBL), for $ 9,190, in addition to anesthesia and operating room expenses.
In the latter procedure, which usually costs about
$ 15,000
and is not covered by health insurance, you would have liposuction of the fat on your sides, abdomen, and lower back, and injected it into your buttocks.
"It's like moving the money from the checking account to the savings account," he says.
And with that, Dayyani became another of the many thousands of women around the world who undergo one of the
most popular cosmetic surgeries
(some men also have it, but not so many).
In 2020 alone, there were
40,320 buttock augmentation surgeries
, including both implants and fat grafts, reports the Aesthetic Society.
According to keyword data from Google, there were 200,000 times more searches for "BBL" per month, between January and May 2021.
It is also
one of the most dangerous
, with the highest number of deaths.
A July 2017 report from the
Aesthetic Surgery
Research and Education Foundation published in the
Aesthetic Surgery Journal
noted that one or two out of 6,000 BBLs resulted in death, the highest death rate for any cosmetic surgery.
In 2018, the British Association for Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery advised surgeons in Britain to
stop performing it
, although they could not outright ban it.
It didn't matter: women
traveled to Turkey or South America
for surgery, where it was significantly cheaper.
At least two British fatalities were located in a clinic in Izmir (Turkey).
The most dangerous plastic surgery
The reason the procedure is so dangerous is pretty straightforward.
The gluteal area has a
huge number of blood vessels
, some very large.
These drain into the inferior vena cava, which is a direct line to the heart.
In this operation, fat is injected into the buttocks with a long metal tube or cannula.
But it can be
difficult
for doctors
to know
exactly
where they are injecting the fat
;
fat has sometimes been mistakenly injected into the gluteal muscle, or just below it.
It can then travel directly to the heart and lungs, obstructing blood flow and causing immediate death.
In 2018, concerned about the death rate, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, and the International Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, among others, formed the
Gluteal Fat Graft Safety Task Force.
, in order to develop safety guidelines around the procedure.
Among his recommendations were: that doctors
stop injecting fat into muscle
and use larger instruments.
"Those cannulas bend, and if they bend when you insert them into the buttock, you have no idea where the tip of the cannula is," said Dr. Luis Ríos, a board-certified plastic surgeon in McAllen, Texas, and former president of the Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation.
A follow-up study conducted in 2020 revealed that
94% of physicians are aware of the recommendations
.
"When done correctly,
when done carefully, it is safe,
" said Dr. Steven Teitelbaum, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Santa Monica, California, who was involved in writing the guidelines but does not perform the surgery.
"We know exactly the mechanism that can cause death and we know how to avoid it. The surgeon just has to maintain
intense attention and concentration
."
Yet
patients continue to die
, especially in "chop shops" - low-cost, high-volume centers often found in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Miami, with doctors who may not be board certified or surgeons.
One of these clinics, Mia Aesthetics, in Miami, had
eight patients who died in the past six years
, four of them from a bad BBL operation, according to
USA Today
and
The Naples Daily News
.
(The company did not return calls.)
"The problem is not only that these doctors are not properly trained, but that by operating unscrupulously, there is no way to collect their data or send them a warning about the dangers of the procedure," said Teitelbaum.
"When we started to recognize that there was a problem with the BBL, we faced the difficulty of figuring out
how to find these people
to get information to them, and unfortunately there was no way to do it."
"I never felt better," says Diana Dayyan.
Photo: The New York Times - NYTNS
Neither Brazilian nor uprising
It is unclear where the name
Brazilian Butt Lift
(lift) came from, as
technically nothing is lifted
.
A Brazilian plastic surgeon named Ivo Pitanguy is credited with pioneering the procedure in the 1960s.
It gradually spread northward, gaining popularity in the United States, around 2010, thanks to
Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian West, and Nicki Minaj
, each of whom is revered for her butt.
The women
deny having had surgical help
.
Kardashian West had an X-ray done during an episode of the reality show Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
Doctors found no implants, although fat grafts were not mentioned).
But a January 2020 editorial in the journal
Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
argued that the procedure was actually christened in 1996, when the
Learning Channel
featured a segment featuring Dr. Leonard Grossman, a board-certified plastic surgeon who performed
fat liposuction on a woman. Brazilian
and injected it into her buttocks.
The segment was called
"Building the Brazilian Butt"
, and thus the name was born.
Instead, the authors proposed that the procedure be called "safe subcutaneous buttock augmentation."
Since then, the amounts of fat injected have only increased.
"I don't know when we got into
the idea that bigger is better
, and we put in ever larger volumes the moment we realized we could do it," said Dr. Oni Garcia, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Miami. .
No one knows for sure what the long-term repercussions are.
But Dr. Arthur W. Perry, a board-certified plastic surgeon in New York and New Jersey and an adjunct professor of surgery at Columbia, is
so concerned that he refuses to perform the procedure
.
"What happens to that fat when you put a lot of dead fat on your glutes?" He wondered.
"Because that's what it is:
dead fat
. We haven't even begun to see the aesthetic disasters of people who walk around with moonscape buttocks,
buttocks bigger than the other
."
"As far as I am concerned, at this time it is not a procedure that is routinely and uniformly performed safely," he said.
A satisfactory result
Dayyani was not worried about dying.
He trusted Hsu, who said he had performed about
2,000 interventions in seven years
and had a waiting list of a year and a half.
Furthermore, he did not have any underlying health problems.
Dayyani took a more philosophical approach: "It's like every time you get on a plane you get a little nervous and take a little risk, but you still do it," she reasoned.
He was more concerned with surviving the operation with
a deformed butt
.
Dayyani wants to be a lawyer and is worried that she won't be taken seriously with such a big butt.
"At some point I want to be in front of a judge," he said.
"I don't want to look crazy.
I just want to make it look like I went to the gym a lot
."
Hsu assured him that he would be conservative;
I also didn't want it to look like a cartoon.
The operation lasted about three hours, after which it felt as if it had been blended in a blender.
Her butt looked like a swollen beach ball, which scared her.
But Hsu assured him that it would shrink over time;
only 70% of the fat remains in the body
.
She also had to receive lymphatic drainage for a week after the procedure to drain the extra fluid in the body.
That hurts
.
(A viral video on TikTok showed a woman screaming in pain while allegedly receiving massages after the BBL.)
For the first few weeks,
she was unable to sit or lie on her back
.
To sleep, Dayyani cut a hole in a lawn chair that would fit her tail, while keeping her breasts raised.
Says it was worth it.
He went from a G cup to a double D, and his belly is flat.
"Now I literally have six pack abs," he says.
And his butt?
It's like Jessica Rabbit's
.
"The operation improved my hourglass figure," he says.
"I can't put on some of my old clothes because my butt doesn't fit into my pants. I never felt better."
By Abby Ellin. © The New York Times
Translation: Patricia Sar
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