Luis Rios, a board-certified plastic surgeon in McAllen, Tex., and past president of The Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation, the research, education and philanthropic arm of the Aesthetic Society. “Those cannulas bend, and if they bend when you put them in the buttock you have no idea where the tip of the cannula is,” said Dr. Fat can then travel directly to the heart and into the lungs, obstructing blood flow and causing immediate death.Ĭoncerned about the mortality rate, in 2018 the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery and the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, among others, formed the Task Force for Safety in Gluteal Fat Grafting, to develop safety guidelines around the procedure.Īmong their recommendations: That doctors stop injecting into the muscle and use bigger instruments. At least two British fatalities have been traced to a clinic in Izmir, Turkey.īut it can be difficult for doctors to know where exactly they’re injecting they have sometimes mistakenly injected fat into the gluteal muscle, or right below it. It didn’t matter: Women would travel to Turkey or South America for the surgery, where it was significantly cheaper.
In 2018, The British Association of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery advised surgeons in the United Kingdom to stop performing it altogether, although they couldn’t ban it outright. A July 2017 report by the Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation in Aesthetic Surgery Journal noted that one to two out of 6,000 BBLs resulted in death, the highest mortality rate for any cosmetic surgery. According to Google keyword data, “BBL” was searched roughly 200,000 times per month between January and May 2021. In 2020 alone, there were 40,320 buttock augmentations, which include both implants and fat grafting, reports the Aesthetic Society. Dayyani became another one of the thousands of women worldwide undergoing one of the most popular cosmetic surgeries (some men get it too, but not very many).