“Imagine you could have everything you ever wanted, but you might have to risk everything to get it,” Chad Teixeira, who lives in Mayfair, London, tells me. He is a 26-year-old PR who, after a lifetime of struggling with weight issues and body insecurity, underwent complex BBL surgery and extensive liposuction, as well as a tummy tuck, in February 2021.
“It was a whirlwind decision,” says Chad, who removed 18 liters – or 35kg of fat – plus a tummy tuck during his eight-hour operation, which more than 50 UK clinics he called deemed life-threatening. a procedure which cost £18,000. “In the UK they didn’t operate on me, they considered it a risk. So I had no choice but to go to Turkey. I booked the first doctor I found. And three days later, I had surgery.”
Chad credits the lockdown with his impulsive decision – the culmination of spending so many months without social detachment from his body and staring at his reflection on the Zoom camera.
In the Surgical Center, a cosmetic surgery clinic in Marylebone, London, say this was something of a pattern. “Because of the lockdown, I’d say the number of inquiries we’ve received about operations across the board – but including BBL surgery – has increased by 20-25%,” says Michael Smith-Hardy, the clinic’s chief surgical officer. .
With more time to scrutinize, more time to research and, perhaps most importantly, more time to scroll through social media, the popularity of cosmetic work increased, so much so that the phenomenon became known as the Zoom Boom. On TikTok, the #BBL hashtag it has more than 4.9 billion views and even spawned a culture of its own: the BBL phenomenon, a kind of mockery of the “precious” perception of women who have had BBL surgery.
Admittedly, this has been a long time coming. There was a time when Pamela Anderson’s breasts were the look-du-jour. Another, when size zero was Channel 4’s hottest diet challenge and Cara Delevingne’s thigh gap had its own Twitter account, but now, times – and beauty standards – have changed again.
Now, the well-documented Kim Kardashian (or, perhaps more appropriately, Jessica Rabbit) the result has been consistently in action for years. Both anecdotally and apparently, the pressure that black women have and continue to face to be curvy, and the documented cultural appropriation that has fueled the popularity of this procedure has arguably never been more present.
“Many women come in for a consultation asking for this extreme look,” explains Mr. Omar Tillo, from the Surgery Center, who has been a board-certified surgeon for 20 years and has specialized in plastic surgery for more than a decade. “For the past five years, the BBL has been a big part of my practice. It’s not a new operation – it’s been done for over 40 years, since the 1980s, originating in South America… It’s a very complicated surgery. a lot of things can go wrong.”
For years, Dr. Tillo explains, it was routine to inject fat taken from areas such as the stomach (the procedure’s trade name is BBL, but clinically it’s a fat transfer injection that always involves liposuction from fatty areas of the body) and injection into gluteal muscles. “The reason is that you have more pressure, more blood flow, so you can expect more adipose tissue to survive in the muscle and gain more bulk – the overdone look. But now we know from studies that this should not be done.”
