What Is Fat Grafting and How Can It Enhance Your Appearance?

Fat is often viewed negatively, but it is important for giving certain areas of the body a youthful and shapely appearance. At Pacifica Cosmetic Surgery Center, we recognize the aesthetic value of strategically placed fat. This understanding has led us to become the number one voted liposuction doctor in Orange County.

Our fat transfer procedures in Newport Beach, CA, offer a unique solution by allowing your surgeon to redistribute your natural body fat. By removing excess fat from areas where it’s unwanted and injecting it into regions that could benefit from additional volume, this technique enhances contours and improves the overall appearance.

What Is Fat Grafting?

Fat grafting is a technique where fat is harvested from one part of your body and reinjected into another. This process, also known as fat transfer, uses your body’s own fat cells, which are carefully purified and prepared before they are reintroduced. Fat grafting improves the harmony and proportions of your body without the introduction of foreign substances.

How Can Fat Transfers Enhance Your Appearance?

Restore Lost Volume Due to Aging

Aging naturally results in a loss of facial volume, leading to less defined features. Fat transfer is a cosmetic procedure that can help reverse this effect by reintroducing a person’s own fat into hollow areas like the cheeks and temples. This can restore volume to these areas and create a more youthful appearance.

Increase the Size of a Desired Feature

Fat transfer allows for the augmentation of specific body features like the lips, breasts, or buttocks without implants or fillers. This can be good for our patients who are looking for a different option. This method uses your own fat to increase size and can offer a natural feel and appearance while being compatible with your body.

Improve the Shape and Contour of an Area

Reshaping areas such as the face, hips, or buttocks is possible with fat grafting. When strategically injecting fat, surgeons can sculpt and enhance the natural contours for a more balanced and pleasing silhouette.

Reduce Fine Lines and Wrinkles

Fat transfer is also ideal for softening the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. The injected fat fills in creases and makes the skin’s surface smooth, which contributes to a rejuvenated skin texture.

Fat Transfer for Facial Rejuvenation

Facial fat transfer focuses on reshaping, contouring, and filling areas on the face. Because the face is one of the most common areas to experience a reduction in youthful fat pads, this technique can be especially helpful for this area. We can replace fat that has diminished with age, sharpen facial features such as the cheeks and jawline, and reduce wrinkles.

Areas Where Fat Transfer Can Be Used

• Around the Eyes: Fat transfer to this area reduces the appearance of hollows under the eyes, crow’s feet, and frown lines.
• Cheeks: Enhancing the cheeks with a facial fat transfer not only adds volume but also lifts the surrounding areas, offering a more youthful appearance.
• Jawline: Defining the jawline through facial fat grafting can create a more structured and pronounced facial contour. This method refines the edges of your jaw and enhances your appearance from all sides.
• Nasolabial Folds: Facial fat grafting is used to smooth out the folds that go from the nose to the corners of the mouth.
• Lips: Fat transfer to the lips provides a natural plumpness and subtly reshapes and volumizes your lips. This enhances your smile and the overall balance of your facial features.

Fat Transfer to the Buttocks

A fat transfer to the buttocks, often referred to as a Brazilian butt lift, uses the patient’s body fat to create fuller, more shapely buttocks. Usually, fat is taken from the abdomen or thighs, but it can be taken from anywhere there is an excess. Then, it is injected into the buttocks.

This creates a natural-looking and noticeable augmentation while also reshaping contours, smoothing lumpy areas, and creating a more pleasing shape and size. This technique not only improves the appearance of the buttocks but also contours the areas from which the fat is taken.

Breast Enhancement With Fat Transfer

Breast enhancement through breast fat transfer is an alternative to implants. During fat grafting breast augmentation, we harvest the fat in the same way that we would do for buttock augmentation, liposuctioning it from specific areas, purifying it, and then injecting it into the breasts. While the results aren’t as dramatic as implants, we can create beautiful, natural-looking results that fit with your body’s contours.

Types of Breast Fat Transfer Procedure

• Fat Transfer Breast Augmentation: This procedure focuses on enhancing breast size and can be used as a standalone procedure. In addition to increasing the overall size, a fat transfer breast augmentation can also subtly alter the shape of the breasts, adding fullness to areas that are lacking and giving them youthful roundness.
• Breast Lift With Fat Transfer: Combining a traditional breast lift with breast fat grafting provides two benefits. This approach not only lifts sagging breast tissue but also adds volume to your own fat. It’s an effective way to refine breast contours while enhancing overall volume.

Procedure Steps

Harvesting

The first step in the fat transfer process involves extracting fat from the donor site such as the abdomen, thighs, or flanks. Depending on the area, we can use different liposuction techniques for fat removal, including traditional liposuction, laser-assisted liposuction, or Smartlipo.

Purification

Once the fat is harvested, it undergoes a purification process. This step removes any tumescent fluid, blood, and oils from the fat sample so that it is ready for fat grafting.

Injection

The final step involves strategically injecting the purified fat into the designated areas. Using precise techniques, the fat is distributed in layers to achieve a smooth, natural-looking increase in volume. We make sure the fat integrates well with the existing tissues to promote longevity and beauty.

Is Fat Grafting the Right Option for You?

A fat transfer may be an ideal solution if you’re seeking to enhance your natural contours or reverse signs of aging with results that integrate seamlessly into your body’s unique shape. At Pacifica Cosmetic Surgery Center, you will receive care from Dr. Hendricks, one of only around 20 triple board-certified surgeons in the U.S. To explore how our fat grafting in Newport Beach, CA, can benefit you, please contact us through our online form or call us at (949) 304-6678.