In the U.S., and primarily on the West Coast and Hollywood, there has been a trend to undergo buttock augmentation for quite some time. Nicki Minaj, the American rapper with Caribbean roots, has become an internationally successful star. Radio stations play her songs which ranked highly in the charts day in and day out. But Nicki is probably known better for her rather huge butt than for her music. Many of her fans – and also many others – desire a butt like Nicki’s and therefore opt for buttock augmentation surgery.
Buttock augmentations were initially performed using silicone implants; however, the usage of the body’s own fat (autologous fat) is catching on more and more as a natural alternative. Though many surgeons in the U.S. have plenty of experience with buttock augmentations, they are often still rather new when it comes to the method of stem cell enrichment. For this reason, more and more American women come to Europe to receive a so-called “Brazilian buttlift” using the more sustainable, stem cell-enriched autologous fat method.
Why is a Brazilian buttlift in such high demand in the United States? There are more women of African descent and Latinas in the U.S. and the ideal form of a buttock is a bit larger than in Europe. American women have ample opportunity to study this enviable form of a buttock in the warmer latitudes of the United States, making the Brazilian buttlift especially popular on the West Coast.
So what at all is a Brazilian butt? In women with African roots, the top and back sections of the buttock are often heavily rounded and bulged whereas the hips are only bulged slightly outwards. The same applies to rapper Nicki Minaj, whose hips are particularly narrow in comparison to her buttock. Before and after photos that were published by the Huffington Post suggest that Nicki’s buttock as it exists today was shaped by a Brazilian buttlift.
The singer enjoys the attention directed at her while neither denying nor confirming the rumors regarding her enlarged buttock: “I don’t mind the question, I don’t mind the fascination. It’s all good. If people are sitting in a barbershop talking about my butt, it’s conversational. That’s what people are going to do. As long as they’re talking about Nicki Minaj, it’s good,” the rapper said in an interview by Full Throttle on MTV2.
In order to attain the effect characteristic for a Brazilian butt, a sufficient amount of autologous fat needs to be extracted, e.g., from the belly or hips. This fat is implanted into the upper section of the patient’s buttock after stem cell enrichment. This procedure is quite similar to stem cell breast augmentation, the only difference is that the buttock is augmented instead of the breasts. In a gentle procedure, the required amount of fat is manually harvested using microcannulas. Stem cells are extracted from a portion of the obtained fat, which are then added to the remaining fat. The specially prepared body fat is finally injected into the buttocks.
The procedure is sustainable, meaning that refreshments are generally unnecessary. A buttock augmentation using stem cell-enriched autologous fat is an outpatient procedure that is done using local anesthesia, thereby ensuring the mobility of the patient. However, patients have to be very careful when it comes to sitting down for the first few weeks, which can be problematic – especially for working women.
Nicki Minaj would probably have gained international fame even without her optimized buttock, but the fact that it has helped her gain even more attention and notoriety, especially outside of the hip-hop world, can hardly be denied. Stars like Miley Cirus seem to look up to her and Justin Bieber also commented positively about Nicki Minaj’s curves… We can therefore assume that Brazilian buttlifts will surely not remain a phenomenon limited to the West Coast.
DDr. Heinrich, MD