Fat Transfer
Adding Youthful Volume and Natural Contouring–From Your Own Body
Patients have often wondered why their unwanted belly and “love handle” fat can’t be removed and used to plump up their cheekbones, breasts, or buttocks. It turns out that they were on to something.
After two decades of research, leading cosmetic surgeons and clinical researchers are now formally reporting that fat does indeed have transformative properties in a number of cosmetic rejuvenation procedures, including those for face, breast, and buttocks.
The Natural Beauty of Fat
Also called micro-lipoinjection or fat transfer, autologous fat transfer involves the removal and relocation of the patient’s own body fat to plump up an area that has lost volume as a result of surgery, injury, aging, or another cause.
Fat not only adds naturalistic volume, but it is also a remarkably regenerative substance: Grafted and/or injected into the skin, it can truly breathe new life into tissue, making it look fresher, rosier, and thicker. Pore size is reduced. Skin damage and wrinkles caused by the sun—virtually impossible to correct entirely with surgery or fillers—can be healed. Scarring is minimized or disappears.
Fat: What’s Inside
According to cosmetic surgeons from around the world presenting at the World Congress on Liposuction Surgery in October 2010, research indicates that stem cells congregating in the grafted fat are responsible for facilitating this renewal. Moreover, the results—while they do take longer to manifest than implants or facial filler injections—may last for years.
It appears that the fat—and from all indications, the stem cells—continue to repair and renew for a long time. They engage in a physiologic process in that initially “fills in” the skin, making the face look younger in terms of volume. Then, this process apparently continues by repairing the damage that the stem cells detect.
What’s Involved in Fat Transfer?
Fat is removed through liposuction, most often from the abdomen. It is then processed by centrifuge to collect the densest fat constituent, which is then injected into the area being treated. Both sites are numbed with local anesthesia. Because the transplanted fat comes from the patient, it does not carry a risk of allergic reaction or rejection. Other advantages potentially long-lasting results and effectiveness on any skin type.
