Breast Augmentation and Tear Drop Implants
Breast Implants, Techniques Comments Off
Sometimes, the best laid plans of mice and men do go astray.
It happens in breast augmentation, too.
When breast augmentation became really popular around 2000, more types and sizes of breast implants were designed and added to plastic surgeons’ offices.
One, the tear-drop shaped implant, came into use because, hey, what could be greater than an implant in the natural shape of a human breast? The tear drop insert has more fullness at the bottom and looks like, well, a tear drop.
But, as always, the devil is in the details. Also known as a contoured or anatomic breast implant, the tear drop shaped inserts had to stay in a single position to provide the desired appearance of naturalness.
But a tear drop implant can rotate or turn upside down. That would give the breast a very strange look indeed and probably require another surgery.
So the envelope of the tear drop implant was textured – instead of smooth — to give internal scarring something to hang onto.
Internal scarring?
Any time nature senses a foreign object inside the body, the invader is walled off with scar tissue. The textured surface allows the scar tissue to get a better grip and hold a tear drop implant in place. At the same time, the textured surface is supposed to prevent the scar tissues from getting too firm a grip, squeezing the implant too much and making it feel hard to the touch.
It’s an undesirable condition known as capsular contracture, a hardening of the augmented breast.
Solution? Many plastic surgeons recommend a round, untextured breast implant instead.
It sounds like a contradiction, but a round breast implant does not necessarily make a round breast. When the patient with round implants stands, the inserts take on a tear drop shape anyhow.
What really makes the difference?
According to New York City plastic surgeon Joel Studin, M.D., the final shape of the breast largely depends on the size and position of the pocket the surgeon creates under the patient’s chest muscle. Other factors include the shape, elasticity and thickness of the patients’ muscles and the implant size.
Dr. Studin blogs that what really creates an artificially round breast is putting the implant atop the chest muscle where there isn’t much good skin or fat coverage.
Lesson learned? Listen to your plastic surgeon! He or she has done that a lot…. provided you chose the right plastic surgeon.
admin @ March 16, 2009