J-Lo (Jennifer Lopez) really spiced things up when she arrived at an Emmy award ceremony with a curvy, toned rear that made the media, her fans and just about everybody else literally drool.

And why not? It’s no secret that shapely breasts and an alluring, curvy posterior are primary female sexual characteristics.

“We got interested in the female breast when a rib was removed from Adam and the buttock implant when J.-Lo showed up in that little dress,” Constantino Mendieta, M.D., a featured plastic surgeon on TV’s “Miami Slice” told CosmeticSurgery.com

Thanks to J.-Lo, many more women started requesting buttock lifts and augmentations to create great glutes. (Moreover, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, gluetial lifts have increased 74 percent from 2002; it is the most significant increase in surgical procedures.)

BUTT LIFT

But a butt lift (doctors know the procedure as a gluteoplasty) is not for sissies, the faint of heart or those with very low pain thresholds. Because your bottom is used so much, any surgical procedure on it will be the most uncomfortable known to plastic surgery, experts say.

Dr. Mendieta knows booty so well because he does many, many buttock augmentations. So, he carefully records the surgical outcomes and other data about his patients to publish and lecture other doctors about his findings.

In his office, Dr. Mendieta performs buttocks sculpting in some cases by harvesting some fat from the side of the patient’s bum to make it narrower. Then, he redeposits the fat on the peak of the butt to make it more round, or, as the doc likes to say, “more bootylicious.” Most patients’ procedures are done with a combination of sculpturing and fat transfer or implants.

FEMALE SHAPES

One of Dr. Mendieta’s contributions is a classification of female fanny shapes. After all, not every human arse is built the same.

“Each woman’s derriere will fall into one of four types,” says Dr. Mendieta. “It will be either round, square, V or A-shaped.”

Body shape often dictates the procedure used. If a patient is overweight or wears an eight to 12 dress size, that person is probably best suited for fat transfer, along with some liposuction.

But the complication rate goes up – to about 60 to 80 percent – if an implant is used on a heavier patient.

However, a thinner patient who wears a size two to four dress, only has only a two to five percent complication rate with implants. But fat transfer is usually out for her because she doesn’t have any to spare.

HINDQUARTER IMPLANTS

Depending on the patient’s frame, rump type and weight, the doctor may use liposuction alone or combine that procedure with an implant or fat transfer. According to Dr. Mendieta’s records, the fat “takes” 85 to 90 percent of the time, given correct harvest and reimplantation procedures.

Implants are round, anatomical like a teardrop or oval and shaped like an egg. Research has shown implants are best placed between layers of muscle.

“That protects the implant and prevents it from dropping down to yield a ‘dirty diaper’ look,” Dr. Mendieta says.

Patients who wear a four to eight dress size fall somewhere in between and may be satisfied with fat transfer but probably will require an implant.

“The usual, expected complications with buttock reshaping and gluetial augmentation are incisions opening,” Dr. Mendieta says. “That happens in about 20 to 30 percent of cases and is really no big deal. The patient just spends another two weeks sleeping on her stomach. Infections, which we doctors dread, happen in only about two percent of cases.”

The worst complication is when the wound breaks open, revealing the implant. Then, the insert must be removed and left out for three months before reinserting.

REDUCED COMPLICATIONS

“I’ve come up with an operation that saves about 80 percent of implants that become exposed, says Dr. Mendieta. “And by carefully selecting patients for the best procedure, I’ve reduce the complication rate to two percent from six.”

You might guess after all that we’re not talking nickels and dimes: The general range of gluetial augmentation varies between $8,000 to about $17,000. Fat transfer costs between $8,000 and $18,000 depending on the area in which you live and the surgeon’s experience.

In recovery, the patient usually wears a compression garment for two weeks, goes back to work in three and can return to the gym in about a month and a half. Depending on how the wound is healing, the patient can place her soon-to-be alluring posterior in a chair in about the third or fourth week after the operation and get behind the wheel of a car after three weeks.

Explains Dr. Mendieta: “Immediately post-op, buttock implants feel rock hard. At the three month mark, they soften tremendously and feel firm like a well worked-out muscle. You never actually sit on the implants; you actually sit on bones. Plus, the implants do not cause cancer nor an auto-immune disease.”

You can find out more about buttock augmentations and lifts on Dr. Mendieta’s website at http://www.Constantinomendieta.com

© 2005 HealthNewsDigest.com