When it comes to getting our butts ready for summer, plastic surgeons say there are many options for bringing your bottom to bikini level. Here, top doctors share both lifestyle tips and in-office procedures that work.
Get combination treatments
“Our patients are loving the combination of CoolTone to tighten and tone the gluteal muscles in combination with Sculptra injectable treatments to restore volume and create lift," says Scottsdale, AZ plastic surgeon Bryan W. Gawley, MD.
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Keep working out
Before New York plastic surgeon Elie Levine, MD tells his patients about in-office treatments for the butt area, he tells them that working out is key. "The first thing I tell people is that you need to work at keeping your butt looking tight and toned," he says. "Doing things like squats and working on toning and being in shape will definitely make everything that we do that much better. You want to start that as much as you can before the summer, but doing it throughout the summer is important, too."
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Consider liposuction
"The perfectly shaped buttocks needs to transit smoothly onto the hip regions and curve further inward and upward to a high waistline, which can be made possible by lipo-sculpting," says Arcadia, CA plastic surgeon Art Yu, MD. "This way, the work from the buttock augmentation will have such a harmonious relationship with the hips and the waist, that the perfect curves from the frontal and posterior views will make the lower limbs appear much longer."
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Go the minimally-invasive route
"Minimally invasive procedures like fat transfer can create a dramatic improvement through just a couple tiny needle pricks," says Dr. Levine, who stays somewhat superficial with his treatments to avoid risks associated with fat transfer to the gluteal muscles.
"I’ve never injected deep fat into the muscle layer. There's no question that treating fat in multiple planes and being able to address it as much as possible has potential to create spectacular results. The problem is that even if you truly know gluteal anatomy, which many plastic surgeons do very well, if you’re not actually seeing those vessels it does open up significant risk."
His solution: staying superficial. "While you may not be able to get the most spectacular results ever in one treatment session, you are able to see dramatic improvement and get great results in a way that doesn’t put people at risk."
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Take the upper body into account
Dr. Yu says that a "buttocks makeover is not just about the butt." According to him, it's also about the whole torso, the buttocks and the thighs. "People always like to describe a beautiful body as 'below the chest, it's all legs' but they may not know the anatomy and the aesthetic standards."
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Conquer cellulite
"I’ll also use fat superficially—super, superficially—for treatment of cellulite," continues Dr. Levine. "What I’ve found over the years is that if you release areas where these fibrous bands have tethered the skin and are creating dimpling, there is a lot of recurrence of cellulite. But, if you use microdroplet techniques of fat, what it can potentially do is treat the cellulite not just in the short term, but in the long term, too."
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