When she woke up from surgery, Kayla Malveaux found herself alone in the clinic recovery room, slumped over in a wheelchair. She felt sharp pain around her face and swollen eyes, but she wasn’t sure why. The operation she’d just had involved fat taken from her abdomen and transplanted into her bottom, an increasingly common procedure called the Brazilian butt lift. Though she can’t say for sure what really happened between the time the surgery was over and the time she woke up, she has a guess. “It’s like they threw me in the wheelchair and then I must have hit my head,” she says.
As the 22-year-old was wheeled out of the Miami cosmetic surgery clinic, she understood. In the waiting room was “a herd of girls,” she says, all waiting for their own procedures with a single surgeon. “I couldn’t see how a doctor can do that many patients a day without overworking themselves, you know?” she says.
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Kayla is one of thousands of women who’ve flown to South Florida — or Turkey or Mexico or Thailand — for questionably cheap operations, where a complex, multi-hour surgery not covered by health insurance can run as low as $3,000, although most clinics advertise BBL packages for around $5,500 (not including aftercare, which can double the cost). These procedures often take place in small clinics, where doctors who might have been trained as dermatologists or pediatricians are legally allowed to advertise themselves as “board certified” physicians even though the extent of their plastic surgery training might have consisted of a single weekend course. To make up for the high cost of running an operating room, they squeeze in as many as eight patients every day.
You can see where the Brazilian butt lift — a physically taxing surgery for the doctor as well as the patient — might start to get dangerous. But this hasn’t stopped the thousands of women who’ve undergone it over the past few years; the number of BBLs globally since 2015 has risen 77.6 percent, according to a survey by the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, and it is now the fastest-growing cosmetic procedure in the world.
As Kayla arrived at the airport after her surgery, she was told the terminal didn’t have any wheelchairs left. On her flight back to California, she realized she was one of several BBL patients on the plane.
You spend enough time on TikTok and Instagram, and it can start to feel like you’re the only person in the world who hasn’t had their butt done. The BBL silhouette is omnipresent and unmissable, an impossibly tiny middle resting atop a plump bottom and thick thighs; at its most extreme it presents a cartoonish version of a fertile woman, a cross between the Venus of Willendorf and Jessica Rabbit. At its most subtle, a BBL just looks like good genes, the kind of golden ratio associated with the most iconic sex symbols of the last 100 years.
The BBL aesthetic of the 2010s and the present day, however, is most often associated with the Instagram influencer, whose body exists to be consumed by the most people possible (whether or not it has been photoshopped is almost beside the point). After Kim Kardashian, one of the ur-examples of the modern influencer, proved with an X-ray that she hadn’t had butt implants, the next logical question was, “Well, how?” The answer, many have speculated, is that she and some of her sisters had gotten Brazilian butt lifts, which wouldn’t have shown up on an X-ray because the procedure involves the removal and retransplant of one’s own fat.
