What Makes Brazilian Butt Lifts So 🪦 Deadly?

Most Dangerous Aesthetic Procedure Ever!!!

First Name Tom, Last Name Foolery… And I’m Everybody’s Uncle!    

Especially all women… My Nieces.

In surgical circles, the Brazilian butt lift (BBL) is known as the deadliest aesthetic procedure ever performed, and despite several calls to improve outcomes, recent data suggest mortality is only getting worse -- especially in South Florida.

Sunny, image-conscious Miami is home to a substantial proportion of the country's high-volume, low-cost clinics where U.S. patients flock for the procedure. Despite widely publicized deaths and changes in rules about performing the procedure in Florida, researchers say it's still causing harm.

"You have people from all over the United States coming to Florida, and they have these complications, and unfortunately, they either have to receive hospital care or they perish," Pat Pazmiño, MD, a plastic surgeon and owner of Miami Aesthetic, told the media.

"And it's affecting the whole country."

Pazmiño and colleagues recently published an analysisopens in a new tab or window of the factors that make South Florida a particularly dangerous place for the BBL, which is also known as gluteal fat grafting. They analyzed 25 BBL deaths resulting from pulmonary fat embolism (PFE), where fat globules travel through the bloodstream and cut off circulation. Blocked pulmonary vessels can lead to respiratory failure and death.

They found most of the deaths occurred after plastic surgery associations tried to make the procedure safer.

'The Most Dangerous Aesthetic Procedure Ever Performed'

The Brazilian butt lift became popular over the past 2 decades, with procedures surging more than 800% over the last decade alone.

Whereas in the '90s, women prized big breasts and a thin silhouette, now wider hips and a fuller buttocks are the ideal, plastic surgeons told the media.

"Forty years ago, it may have been Kate Moss or Pamela Anderson," M. Mark Mofid, MD, associate clinical professor of plastic surgery at the University of California San Diego, told the media.

"Now it's Jennifer Lopez and it's Kim Kardashian, and they look very different from the America that existed forty years ago."

During a BBL, a surgeon uses liposuction to remove fat from the abdomen, flanks, or back of an anesthetized patient. The surgeon then uses a syringe attached to a cannula to reinject or "graft" the reserved fat into the buttocks. The cannula is inserted repeatedly deep under the skin, fanning out from a few small incision points to distribute the fat across different areas.

It's known as a "blind" procedure, and surgeons can inadvertently injure the large vessels in the muscle or even inject fat directly into those vessels if the cannula goes too deep. The fat can travel via the bloodstream to the heart and lungs, and deaths from such a pulmonary fat embolism can occur within hours of the procedure, or even on the operating table.

Sometimes, this has happened when a patient was turned from a prone to a supine position on the operating table, putting pressure on the lower buttocks, according to Pazmiño's analysis.

It wasn't until recently that plastic surgeons realized some BBL procedures were going very wrong. Mofid started performing BBLs at a time when only two other surgeons in the country were doing them. But as their popularity grew, he became alarmed by reports of BBL-related deaths in journals and conferences.

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By: Sophie Putka

Image(s): Getty

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