Brazilian butt lift task force of Australian plastic surgeons to monitor rise of risky surgeries
AS more Aussie girls want to look like ‘bootylicious’ stars, four plastic surgeons are joining forces to monitor risky Brazilian butt lift procedures.
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EXCLUSIVE
A TASKFORCE is being formed to monitor the dramatic rise of risky ‘Brazilian butt lift’ surgery across Australia.
Headed by past president of the Australasian Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), Tim Papadopoulos, the new Australian Brazilian butt lift patient safety taskforce will involve four leading plastic surgeons and will start in a couple of weeks.
Mr Papadopoulos said the Aussie taskforce would be industry-based and modelled on an international taskforce - which comprised the world’s premier plastic surgery organisations - and researched, recorded and reported on complications and deaths associated with BBLs.
The ASAPS-endorsed taskforce would;
• Identify risks and opportunities to improve patient safety in buttock fat grafting (colloquially known as Brazilian butt lifts) in Australia;
• Report its findings - along with recommendations and guidelines - to members of ASAPS, the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS) and Federal Government;
• Engage with, and inform, the public on safety issues associated with BBLs.
Inspired by the Kardashians, Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce and other ‘bootylicious’ celebrities and social media stars, increasing numbers of young Australian women are requesting the expensive, fat-injecting procedure, designed to substantially increase the size of their bottoms.
And many are having the surgery performed by doctors calling themselves ‘cosmetic surgeons’, who are not trained plastic surgeons, for cheaper rates.
Australian cosmetic surgery chain, Cosmos Clinic, which has centres in Melbourne, Sydney, the Gold Coast, Adelaide and Canberra claims to have performed more than 2000 Brazilian butt lifts since 2010. All the surgeries have been performed by ‘cosmetic’ rather than specialist plastic surgeons.
While he was not aware of any deaths related to BBLs in Australia, Mr Papadopoulos said there had been many complications and fatalities in the United States, Brazil and Mexico following the procedure.
Gold Coast woman Evita Sarmonikas, 29, died while having a BBL in Mexico in 2015.
The international BBL taskforce has found the mortality rate associated with the procedure “unacceptably high”, at one death in every 3000 surgeries.
And a report released in July last year found there had been at least 25 fatalities in the five years from 2012 to 2017 in the United States.
A member of ISAPS, Mr Papadopoulos said he had just returned from a conference in Brazil where butt lifts were the hottest topic.
“A lot of my colleagues are now saying butt is the new breast (surgery),” he said.
Because there was no comprehensive data being collected on BBLs in Australia, monitoring it and ensuring best practice across the board was currently impossible; which was why a taskforce was urgently needed, Mr Papadopoulos said.
Other forms of surgery, such as hip and knee replacements are reported to a national registry.
Up to 30 per cent of women seeking treatment through his Sydney clinic now inquired about BBL surgery, Mr Papadopoulos said.
Melbourne plastic surgeon Morris Ritz, who has been asked to join the taskforce, said it was mostly women in their 20s and 30s requesting BBLs.
The cost of the day surgery varied widely, based on the amount of time it took to perform, but averaged between $14,000 and $18,000 at his clinic, Mr Ritz said.
Mr Papadopoulos said the average cost at his clinic was between $8000 and $12 000.
At Cosmos Clinic, a cosmetic surgery chain, Brazilian Butt lifts are offered from $7000.
Nearly all deaths related to BBLs overseas had resulted from fat being injected deep into the buttock muscles, and then getting into major veins and travelling to the heart or lungs, Mr Papadopoulos said.
In Australia, surgeons performed BBLs by injecting fat under the skin, and not into the muscle, reducing the risk, Mr Papadopoulos said.
But all surgery carried risks, and anyone considering having a BBL should trust only Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (FRACS) qualified plastic surgeons, he stressed.
Cosmos Clinic founder and director Joseph Ajaka confirmed none of the doctors performing its BBL surgeries were plastic surgeons.
However, the Cosmos Clinic Brazilian butt website gave a distinctly different impression when News Corp investigated.
“On average, our plastic surgeons inject 1000 – 1200 mls per buttock cheek and in some cases we may inject up to 1.8L of purified fat into each cheek,” the Brazilian butt section of its website stated early last week.
It was changed to “our doctors” only after being bought to the attention of Dr Ajaka by News Corp.
Dr Ajaka said women were coming to Cosmos clinics with photos of celebrities and asking for bottoms of similar size and shape.
Kylie Jenner and Beyonce were the two most frequently requested bottom shapes and women were asking for bigger bottoms than they were just a year ago, he said.
‘I WENT AS BIG AS I COULD GO’
TANYA Bird is pleased as punch with her new butt.
Nearly a year after the Sunbury woman underwent Brazilian butt surgery with Cosmos Clinic in Melbourne, she says she is still “more than happy” with the result.
Ms Bird, 27, said Cosmos Clinic was recommended by a friend, and was the easiest to find on the internet when she searched for Brazilian butt lifts.
She found her doctor – who is not a trained plastic surgeon – pleasant and professional to deal with, and, while she was awake for the surgery, could not remember much of the procedure.
“I couldn’t sit down on it for two weeks afterwards but it wasn’t too bad otherwise. I had to lie on my stomach for a while and it felt like I’d been working out hard at the gym – it just felt really sore like that,” Ms Bird said.
If there had been an opportunity to “go bigger”, she might have.
But with a small frame and little fat to transfer her new BBL – which she estimates is about twice its previous size – is conservative compared to many others.
“I went as a big as I could go, with the amount of fat they could get because I’m not big - I only weigh about 65 kilos. If I weighed a lot more, I could have had a lot more transferred, but they took everything they could and it’s (my butt) in proportion to the rest of my body,” Ms Bird said.
The BBL was “reward” for all she had gone through since a car accident in 2013, which left her seriously injured and in a wheelchair for some months, causing muscle wastage, Ms Bird said.
“I worked hard at the gym beforehand but I have a lot of restrictions now so I can’t lift as heavy as I used to, to build my butt that way. I just wanted to get back to a good shape.”
‘IT MADE ME FEEL MORE WOMANLY’
IT was Nicki Minaji’s voluminous butt that inspired Sydney woman Ashley Candela to bump up the size of her own.
The sales manager said she wanted to make her already ample booty even bigger, and in February this year sought the services of Cosmos Clinic to help turn the dream into a reality, confident the cosmetic surgery centre would give her exactly what she wanted, without expressing safety concerns.
She’s happy with the result but wants to make her bottom even bigger again, and plans to have butt implants before summer to achieve the Minaji-size rump she desperately wants.
Ms Candela, 33, said having a large bottom made her “feel more womanly” and she loved the look of Nicki Minaji’s Brazilian butt.
She chose Cosmos Clinic – which does not have trained plastic surgeons - to perform her Brazilian butt lift because “they were promoting it more than anyone else” and “they give you the bum you want”, Ms Candela said.
“I had a girlfriend go to a doctor in Melbourne (for a Brazilian butt lift) and she is quite a tall girl and they would only inject 400 mls (of fat) in each side and she wanted bigger and she wasn’t given what she wanted,” she said.
With Cosmos Clinic, Ms Candela said she knew she would get what she asked for.
“They do exactly what you ask for … not like ‘oh, that’s not safe,” she said. “When I was looking at other doctors they weren’t really giving the result that I wanted.”
Ms Candela said her friend’s surgeon told her he could only inject 400mls of fat into each butt cheek safely because any more would not “take”.
“I said to my friend that doesn’t make sense because I’m half the size of you and I’ve got double the amount as you!”
Originally published as Brazilian butt lift task force of Australian plastic surgeons to monitor rise of risky surgeries