Fat Transfer | Fat Grafting for the Breasts, Buttocks & Face

Less isn’t always more, and many patients are looking for a procedure to add volume to the areas of the body that need it most. For those who would like to improve the size or shape of their breasts or buttocks, restore or add volume to the face, or fill in folds, wrinkles, or fine lines, a fat transfer may be a good option.

Fat transfer involves the removal of unwanted fat from common trouble spots, such as the abdomen, hips, and thighs, so that it can used in more desirable locations including the breasts, buttocks, and face. Bellevue cosmetic surgeon Dr. Alex Sobel can help you achieve beautiful fat transfer results for your body and has even served as a major contributor to the development and research behind fat transfer.

How Do Fat Transfers Work?

A fat transfer (or autologous fat grafting) is a minimally invasive, non-surgical procedure that does not require traditional incisions or fillers using foreign materials.  This procedure uses your own fat cells as an augmentation agent to enhance parts of the body that need a lift due to aging or that you would like to increase the size of. Popular treatment areas include the breasts, buttocks, and several different facial areas. A fat graft is particularly effective at plumping skin around the eyes, along the cheeks, and at the jawline.

To begin the procedure, Bellevue body contouring surgeon Dr. Sobel will remove a small amount of fat from locations such as the hips, thighs, back, or abdomen using liposuction. It’s important to note that a fat transfer does not have the same results as a full liposuction procedure, and the fat removal process will not result in significant body contouring. Discussing your ideal results during your consultation will allow us to help you choose the best procedures to get you there.

Once enough natural fat has been harvested, it is thoroughly purified and transferred to the desired location using blunt cannulas. These tiny hollow tubes have a small hole at each end to allow for the precise placement of fat cells. The fat is injected as tiny droplets, creating a fuller, more voluminous look.

Fat grafting is a hand-harvesting method that requires advanced knowledge of the whole body. Proper purification is essential, and our practice has the best equipment available to ensure safe and effective fat transfers. We have a proven track record of fat transfer success and can help you add volume to your face, breasts, or buttocks without using fillers.

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Fat Transfer for Fuller Lips

For those who wish to correct natural or age-related lip thinning to achieve full, shapely lips, fat grafting offers a long-lasting lip enhancement option. Your own fat is an ideal filler for your lips as it naturally replenishes what is missing without injecting foreign fillers into your body.

Because a small portion of the grafted adipose (fat) tissue is reabsorbed by the body after injection during fat transfer, this technique produces a soft, natural look that lasts—making it an excellent option for patients who are looking for subtle but noticeable improvement in lip size and shape. If you’re unsure whether fillers or fat injections are right for you, schedule a consultation to learn more and discuss your options.

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Facial Fat Transfer

A fat transfer is one of the most effective ways to:

• Add facial volume
• Fill in facial folds or scars
• Lift your cheeks with added fullness.

As your face ages, it loses fullness, which can create facial folds, highlight wrinkles, cause your features to look fallen, and give you a hollow appearance.

Fat grafting can restore fullness to the eyes, cheeks, and jawline by transferring unwanted fat to the places that need it most–without the invasive requirements of a facelift. As an added bonus, some patients report a more radiant appearance and improvement in skin texture and tone after a fat transfer. Fat injections prompt the skin to become fuller and more youthful without introducing foreign fillers into the face.

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The procedure is minimally invasive and does not require facial incisions or scarring, making it a popular option for patients who want an alternative to a facelift or brow lift. In addition, those seeking a full facelift or facial feminization may benefit from combining these procedures for ultimate facial rejuvenation as volume cannot be restored by a facelift or brow lift alone. Dr. Sobel will discuss these options with you during your consultation.

• Related: Cheek contouring with buccal fat removal »

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Fat Transfer For Fuller Breasts

A fat transfer can subtly increase your breast size for natural yet noticeable results. Additionally, Dr. Sobel can enhance breast augmentation results with fat grafting to hide rippling or implant visibility and create a more natural breast contour. It can correct mild asymmetry or slight unevenness in the breasts.

• Read more on this option for breast augmentation in Dr. Sobel’s blog post on Want to Make Your Breasts Bigger Without Implants? Here’s Why You Should Consider Fat Transfer.

Fat transfers can also be perfectly paired with top surgery or other breast procedures, such as breast reconstruction, breast reduction, a breast lift, or a breast lift with augmentation. Dr. Sobel will evaluate your current breast size and body type during a consultation to help you determine if a fat transfer is the best choice for your surgical plan.

Video transcript

Fat transfer to the breast is an incredibly versatile procedure and is growing increasingly so. It has always had an allure as a natural alternative to breast implants, but especially with the current understanding of breast implant illness (BII), it provides women with more of a choice at the outset of what type of enhancement they might choose for their breasts. For those who have decided they no longer want their breast implants, it offers an opportunity to restore some of the volume they had gained from their implants.

What’s particularly exciting about fat transfer to the breast is what we’ve learned from fat grafting to the buttocks and even fat grafting to the face. These three fat grafting procedures grew up on different trajectories. Fat grafting to the face was largely an aging face-type procedure when fillers weren’t widely available and didn’t accomplish everything we wanted them to. With buttock fat grafting, we needed very large volumes. The story of fat grafting to the breast is largely a radiographic one, relating to mammography. Breast cancer, unfortunately, is common, and women have mammograms. Until radiologists became comfortable reading mammograms that involved fat grafts, the procedure presented some diagnostic challenges.

Over time, we began to realize how much each procedure could learn from the others. The great victory for fat grafting to the breast came from fat grafting to the buttock, specifically in the use of larger injection cannulas. While larger cannulas might sound alarming, this is still a minimally invasive procedure, and these are still small cannulas. They allow for much better delivery of parcels of fat with stroma—basically the connective tissue that supports the fat and transferred stem cells, helping them do very well. This success in the buttock grafting paradigm was shifted to the breast, and the outcomes have become so much more impressive.

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Fat Transfer For Better Buttocks

A Brazilian butt lift is a popular procedure that can enhance the size, shape, and proportions of your lower body using fat transfer. Unlike a traditional butt lift, during a Brazilian butt lift, Dr. Sobel strategically conducts liposuction where it’s needed and then precisely places fat injections to provide a natural looking appearance that enhances your current shape.

If you’re seeking extensive body contouring after weight loss, a Brazilian butt lift could be part of a body lift or mommy makeover, which combines procedures to target removal of excess fat and skin. Dr. Sobel has extensive expertise in Brazilian butt lift and can help you achieve a rounder, more lifted backside.

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Recovery & Results of Fat Transfers

The recovery period after a fat transfer depends on the extent of liposuction and injections conducted during your fat transfer surgery. In general fat transfer for facial augmentation has a shorter recovery time than fat transfer used for butt or breast augmentation. If fat injections have been combined with other procedures, your recovery time will correlate with the recovery time of those additional procedures.

While you can often notice results immediately after the procedure, it’s important to be patient as any bruising and swelling heals, revealing the final results of your fat transfer. You can view real patient before and after results in our gallery, including those who have had fat transfers to the face, breast, or buttocks.

Video transcript »

The most important question about any cosmetic procedure is what to expect at the end of the year and whether or not the results will be stable. Fat grafting has had a reputation for instability, perhaps the worst of any cosmetic procedure, but this is often due to how long the patient is followed, particularly in terms of photography. What was learned approximately 15 years ago is the contemporary model of what happens to fat when it’s transferred. We used to believe that we simply moved the fat, and whatever survived, survived. We talked about “take rates,” but this term no longer makes sense because nearly the entire fat graft dies—if not all of it—but that’s okay.

Bench science teaches us that what’s happening is likely due to stem cells, not fetal stem cells, but those already destined to become fat cells from the osy-derived line. These cells are transferred, they don’t die, and although they experience cell death around them, they remain unaffected. Surgeons and patients shouldn’t be alarmed. It’s actually a fascinating biological process where those stem cells differentiate into mature adult cells, take on lipids, and remain for life, behaving according to the biology of where they were transferred from. So, if you have stubborn lower abdominal fat but can’t maintain fullness in the upper pole of your breast, now that upper pole will behave like the stubborn fat.

However, patients need to understand that the fat graft process of cell death takes about four months. Four months is the lower limit of how small the graft will get, and at that point, most of the swelling has also gone down. During this time, patients may have enjoyed the temporary swelling but may wonder, “Where did it all go?” The truth is, by the end of the year, the fat graft differentiates and looks wonderful. Photos taken at this time give a clearer sense of the results.

Historically, especially with breast fat grafting, I would counsel patients that they might not gain a full cup size, but they would feel better about the way their clothes fit, especially in terms of fullness in the upper pole of the breast. By showing photographic examples, patients could decide whether this was the right procedure for them. Now, we can achieve even more. From staged fat grafting, we’ve learned that you can gain much more volume in a second stage. Why? Because the breast has more host tissue, conditioned to accept the new fat. Additionally, from fat grafting to the buttock, we’ve learned that larger cannulas can deliver better-performing packets of stroma that support the fat, leading to bigger results. Now, we do expect more than a cup size gain.

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Is fat grafting right for me? Schedule a consultation with Dr. Sobel to find out.

The only way to know if you are a good candidate for a fat transfer is to have a personalized consultation with Dr. Sobel either virtually on in person at our office. He can evaluate your body type and facial features to determine if a fat transfer is the right procedure to help improve your appearance. Any consultation is free of charge, so contact us today to see if this treatment is a good fit for you.

Areas served:

• Bellevue
• Seattle
• Kirkland
• Redmond

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