Today, Explained - The $5,000 butt

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

The Brazilian butt lift isn’t just a cosmetic surgery; it’s a lifestyle. Vox’s Rebecca Jennings explains how influencers gave a decades-old procedure new life. Today’s show was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Haleema Shah. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And oh my God, Becky, look at her butt. No one says that anymore. It's more like... Oh my God, Becky, look at her butt. No one says that anymore. It's more like... My anaconda don't want none unless you got buns, hun. Big, round butts have always existed. And Black and Latinx artists have long celebrated them in music and pop culture. Yeah, he love this fat ass. But it wasn't until recently that white America embraced the peach emoji behind.

What you gonna do with all that junk? All that junk inside your trunk. I'ma get, get, get, get you drunk. Get you love drunk off my hump. And it wasn't until really recently that a lot of people were willing to get surgery to make sure they had it. A Brazilian butt lift. It's the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world, and you can thank the internet for that. My name is Heli Larson.

I'm a podcaster, a TikToker. I make videos just kind of exposing the truth behind this whole glamorous online facade that people like to paint. I wouldn't necessarily consider myself an influencer myself, but I consume influencer content and like to talk about it a lot. Hi, love. Today is nail day and I'm going to bring you guys along with me. I decided to get a Brazilian butt lift like 2016, 2017 when I first actually got into stripping. It's definitely something that a lot of girls do get. Like obviously you're gonna invest in something that is making you money. So girls would invest in boobs, a butt, lips, extensions, XYZ, whatever it is going to make you look better. So it is the way to increase your own income.

Like if you are already a good hustler and then you have a big butt, it's like, wow, you know, you're going to make more money, obviously. I was very insecure about my body before I ever got a BBL or ever got into dancing. Like I had always had a little belly. Like even when I was skinny, I had always had like a little pouch right there. So that my belly was definitely my biggest insecurity. It wasn't necessarily that I had a small butt or wanted to get a huge butt. That was obviously a goal. But the main thing that I wanted was my belly to be gone.

I wanted a flat stomach. And the fact that they could take it out of my stomach and put it into my butt, that just made it all the better. All right, y'all'all bbl update this is how my body looks i love the stomach it looks really cute and toned there is literally no waste like look how small the waist is guys this is the booty when i first learned what a bbl was the first thing i did was go straight to youtube and start looking at influencers and their experiences with getting the procedure. Hi guys, so I just got finished marking up and I'm nervous. Loki, you guys just seen you cry in the bathroom because I vlogged that, but I feel better now. And they would just vlog their entire experience, show it from

beginning to end from their pre-op, the surgery, post-op, healing, everything. Like, you see everything. My face is super swollen. But the pain, if I could describe it, it feels like you did, like, a bunch of squats the day before. And, like, it hurts. Like, it doesn't feel like, okay, I got a cut and it's healing. It feels like you did a bunch of squats and it feels tight and it feels like that's just how it feels and even to like a tmi point you know these vloggers they really put everything out there so

i personally thought i knew everything because i saw it but i promise you nothing in this world can prepare you for a bbl a bbl is more of an attitude than like a surgery at this point. This is Rebecca Jennings. I'm a senior reporter at The Goods by Vox and our resident TikTok expert. On TikTok, it has been sort of a long running joke that, you know, certain mannerisms are associated with women who have had BBLs. It starts from a person named Anthony Bumba. They started doing these video series set to this one specific song where they would use just sort of like certain mannerisms, certain positions of speaking, certain smizes, you know,

flipping their hair back, you know, in a really like long, exaggerated way. The kind of person that doesn't mind if they take up all of your time to make themselves look the best. That's what they told me when they told me about the inspiration for the character, which they call Miss BBL. And Miss BBL is, you know, it's kind of like an amalgam between Amber Rose and the Kardashians and all these women who have sort of made a career on, like, not being ashamed of the fact that they've had work done. They spend money on it. They spend all of their time basically, like, looking perfect for the camera and make no apologies about that.

So this character, Miss BDL, is inspired by people like Amber Rose, The Jenners, Kim Kardashian. Are their butts natural? Do we know? I mean, I think for every celebrity it's different. A few years ago, you know, Kim Kardashian had to x-ray her butt to prove that she didn't have implants. So what brings you in today? This is a really crazy request. My sisters have dared me to get a butt x-ray because there are so many rumors that I have butt implants and I'm so tired of them. But it's interesting because the BBL doesn't include implants. It's just taking out your fat from one part of your body and putting it in

there. So it wouldn't really show up on an x-ray. So we don't know. But, you know, people have made plenty of speculations otherwise. Has anyone like ever done a study about how people end up with the perfect peach emoji butt? Do you just have really good genetics? Do you generally do like a lot of squats and weighted hip thrusts? Or does it always take a BBL? Well, it's funny because, you know, plenty of people have like large butts just naturally. The thing about a BBL is it's creating this very, very hourglass shape, a very exaggerated look that very few people in the natural world have. Because usually when you have a lot of fat on your butt, you also have a lot of fat on your thighs. You have a lot of fat on your waist. You like, you know, everybody's fat goes different places, but it's very rare to have like a

ton of fat in your butt and then like nothing at your waist. You know, that's like Jessica Rabbit cartoon proportions. So sure, there are certain people who are very genetically blessed. I think Kim Kardashian is one of those people that just like came out of the womb looking like Jessica Rabbit. And that's just what happened. But once you get people sort of copying that aesthetic and people using face filters and body filters to achieve that aesthetic, then it becomes more

and more desirable. And then more people go try to create that in the real world as well. So let's talk about the Brazilian butt lift surgery itself. How does it work? The easy answer is it's liposuction from your middle and a fat transplant to your butt. But it's a lot more complicated than that because liposuction already is a bit of a dangerous procedure. You know, everybody has heard like horror stories of liposuction gone wrong. But the fat transplant is when it gets really, really dangerous. And the reason why is because your butt has a lot of like very large blood vessels because you're sitting on it a lot. And so it needs a lot of blood vessels to get blood going there. And a lot of those blood vessels are very thick. And if you insert fat into a blood vessel, it could then go to your lungs and your heart and give you a pulmonary embolism and then you are dead.

So there's been many, many fatalities with the Brizola butt lift over the decades. And it's a very controversial procedure. There are some plastic surgeons who don't do it. It has gotten a little more safer in the past few years because it's been so popular. But in general, it's one of the more dangerous plastic surgeries that you can get. Do we have any statistics on how many Brazilian butt lifts end up in death? So a 2017 study placed the worldwide mortality rate at 1 in 3,000, which is really, really high. The ratio is getting better and better.

In 2019, one survey estimated that the mortality rate is 1 in about 15,000, which is pretty on par with many invasive plastic surgery procedures. And, you know, it's going down. But it's still higher than the mortality rate from liposuction alone, which is 1.3 in 50,000, or just outpatient surgery in general, which is about 0.25 in 100,000. So it's relatively dangerous compared to most surgeries. Where do these surgeries usually take place? Yeah, so in the U.S., the capital of the BBL and plastic surgery

in general is Miami. And the reason for that is sort of the BBL look has been very popular there, but also because plastic surgeons can make a lot of money by opening up a plastic surgery clinic in Miami because there are a ton there. They offer really, really cheap services. And so people fly in from all over the country, they pay like $5,000 for their BBL at this place that, you know, might not have doctors who are certified in the proper places that you would think that they might be. And so you get like a ton of people performing BBLs for cheap in this one city. And so it becomes almost like a factory out of there. But if elsewhere to get, you know, like a cheap BBL, you can go to Mexico, Thailand, Turkey,

lots of places that will provide, you know, services for Americans and other international clients. It seems like there's a lot of shady doctors involved in the world of BBLs or shady, I don't know, professionals, how are they getting away with that? There are so many because essentially it makes them money. And they're also getting away with it because the law is sort of on their side when it comes to allowing doctors to basically do whatever they want. And so in America, if you have an MD, if you are a licensed medical doctor, you can then set up a clinic to do whatever your patients desire as long as they have written consent to do it. So you could get someone whose specialty is podiatry and then they decide, oh, well, BBLs are going to be a bigger moneymaker for me. So I'm going to go get like certified quotes like in this crappy weekend course to perform BBLs, which are like obviously

a very intense surgery. A weekend course? Yes. You need more like training to drive a car. And a lot of the times those weekend courses are trained by people who also like have very minimal training in this procedure. So it's really, really shady. And there's been many lawsuits over the years where people end up getting really hurt or killed from doctors who clearly have no clue what they're doing. But technically, they're allowed to do that. And how much might a BBL cost someone on the lower end and how much might it cost on the higher end? Some of these Miami clinics advertise as low as $3,000, which is astonishingly low for a surgery of this magnitude. And doctors I spoke to said that, you know, if you're paying less than $10,000 for a BBL, you should run away because they're cutting costs in some regard.

If you're primarily interested in the Brazilian butt lift, that's $4,000, adding the fat back to the buttocks. But where do we get it from? $5,000 is like the most typical like advertised rate with these Miami clinics. They like, you know, they advertise on social media, they target low income women. And you know, they make it seem really desirable. They can just like go to Miami for a trip and then go home with a new body. Also, you have to typically double the cost because you have to account for traveling and then aftercare, which is a huge deal. It can be months of, you know, daily lymphatic massages and, you know, sleeping on your stomach and only using a BBL pillow and wearing very constrictive corset-like, Spanx-like garments.

You have to wear that for months after. So it's a pretty intense recovery procedure as well. So usually when you think about surgery in a hospital, maybe the surgeon who's performing that surgery, that might be their only surgery that day. The patient who's just had surgery is usually after they're like released from the operating room. They're staying in the hospital for a couple of days, maybe even weeks.

Is that what's happening here with BBLs? No. And I mean, I'm sure some places are treat their patients very well that perform BBLs. But these are not the places that are advertising on the Internet everywhere being like, come to Miami, get a BBL, and then go back home. It'll be great. What they're doing is fitting as many patients in one day as possible. And what's important to note is that this surgery is extremely physically taxing for surgeons and patients, obviously. It can take up to five hours for one. And so if you have six, seven, eight, nine patients in a single day performed by a single surgeon, that is some serious negligence happening. And when the surgery is over, when the aftercare is over, do women get the results they want or do they get more work done

after that? Well, it's funny because a lot of doctors I've spoken to say, you know, clients come in with these wish pictures and they have to tell them that, you know, A, that's maybe not realistic for your body, but also that those pictures, the women in them probably had like one, two, three, maybe more BBLs because, you know, you can only transfer a certain amount of fat by law. But, you know, if you transplant too much fat at once, you know, the doctors described it to me like fat is sort of like a plant. It's like a living organ that has to develop roots within its new environment in order to stay alive. So what you get if you transfer too much fat is that a lot of that fat sort of dies off and just like shrinks and decomposes inside of you. And so you could end

up with like a really lopsided butt. And a lot of the girls that have had BBLs, they're like, you know, everybody falls in love with their immediate post surgery butt, but it's going to shrink because not all of that fat is going to survive. So one BBL procedure can only accomplish so much. So I had to fly to Miami for my procedure with my mom, actually. And we ended up staying in an Airbnb. You have the option of staying in a recovery home, which is where there are nurses that are there. You stay there by yourself. Like, you don't have a family member come with you.

The nurses that are in the home will take care of you. You're literally in, like, a little hotel with all these girls that are bandaged up. Like I did not want that option for myself. I was very grateful enough to have my mom come with me. So we just stayed a couple miles down from the clinic. op consultation, you're pretty much free to just like hang out until your operation. I came back two days later with my mom and you have to come in like a robe pretty much, like they're going to take all your clothes because you're about to go into your procedure. My personal experience was absolutely awful. My surgery was scheduled for 9.30. They didn't even take me in to get checked in until noon. Then I was waiting in a super cold office for two hours. I didn't go under until 2 p.m. So it was just like a long day. After your surgery, you're put in a room with other girls that are also waking up from surgery

and they just kind of let you wake up when the anesthesia wears off. And then you're like, where am I? I just remember I woke up and I was just thanking the nurse so much. I just kept saying, thank you so much. Thank you for being here for me. Like, it's her job to be there when you wake up from surgery. I was so confused. I didn't know if they had called my mom.

Like, I was telling them, I need to call my mom and tell her to come get me. And they're like, she knows. She's on her way. When I woke up the next day from surgery after the drugs had worn off, all the pain pills, the anesthesia had worn off, I wanted to die. I know not everybody has the same experience, but I quite literally wanted to die. My face was swollen from like sleeping on my stomach. My body was just in pain everywhere because they literally, like I'm going to get graphic here for a second, but in the procedure, they are literally detaching your skin from your muscle and sucking out the fat in between. Now that I am two and a half years since I got my procedure, sometimes my legs do get numb from sitting down

too long. And I don't remember that being a thing before. And then the other thing is sleeping is so hard because it's like not a natural body. You know what I mean? Like laying on your back, it's your spine was not meant to have an ass, you know? What I wanted out of a BBL was to feel differently about my body and quite literally nothing changed. The feelings that I had about my body, the insecurities that I had about my body, I had all those insecurities, all those negative self-talk, all of that. As soon as I got out of surgery, even after I healed, it took years to feel comfortable in my body

and it had nothing to do with the procedure. If I knew everything that I know now, I probably wouldn't have gotten it. But now that I'm at this point where I did get the surgery done, and I then went in and did all of like the deep work and the inner work and actually became somebody that I liked, you know, I am so appreciative. I'm so grateful that I did it. I look great in clothes that I didn't necessarily look great in before

just because my body didn't have a flat stomach before. I personally do believe that there's a responsibility for influencers to say certain things and be as honest, but I have different standards than everybody else. Like my intention in this life is to make sure that people are making informed decisions when it comes to these more dangerous acts. You know what I mean? Like when it comes to stripping, when it comes to plastic surgery, when it comes to all of these things in life that are on the dangerous side, like I like to live my life on the edge. You should be able to do whatever you want, but be honest about it. Tell these young girls like I didn't work out and starve myself to get this body. I went to a doctor. After the break, before people were paying

thousands to get the perfect bubble butt, they were paying thousands to get rid of it. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself.

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listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. So, Rebecca, it might be an obvious answer, but where does the Brazilian butt lift come from? So the Brazilian butt lift comes from Brazil, naturally. Cosmetic surgery actually has a really long history in that country because it's often been used as a place to study eugenics, which has a really nasty history in the early 20th century. In 1918, Dr. Renato Kael founded the Eugenics Society of Sao Paulo, which was basically to like erase all signs of Black and Indigenous physical appearance. And they had a lot of poor women that they could sort of use as experiments, essentially. And from that, it had kind of kept its reputation as like this site for plastic surgery. And in 1960, a surgeon named Ivo Pitanguy founded the world's first plastic surgery training center in Brazil.

And that's where he sort of pioneered this technique that then became known as the Brazilian butt lift. And so surgeons would sort of come from all over the world to learn his techniques and the Brazilian butt lift. And so surgeons would sort of come from all over the world to learn his techniques and the Brazilian butt lift included. Wait, so the same people who are trying to get rid of traits associated with Black and Indigenous women, like a big butt, were the same people who came up with the surgery to give you that big butt? Like, how does that shift happen? Yeah, no, it's really wild because, you know, even when the Brazilian butt lift was invented in Brazil, it was still sort of this very, like, racially charged thing where, you know, you had Brazilians of European descent saying like, oh, I don't want like a big butt like that. I don't want to look like people of other races. But it was like a beauty standard within those communities. So, you know, from there, it sort of traveled north.

And, you know, it certainly exploded once pop culture started to sort of embrace non-white celebrities. And, you know, we got Jennifer Lopez and Nicki Minaj and sort of mainstream beauty standards incorporating those of non-white communities. Black women have had this bottom all our lives. Exactly, and Latin women are the same way. And Latin women too. We're the same, we're shaped like that, you know, so it's not a big deal to me, but I guess that people are not really exposed to that on the daily until lately with the Latin explosion.

The idea that like big butts are hot, I think, was like a new thing in like the 2000s for white mainstream audiences. When does it become a thing that white women want? was like a new thing in like the 2000s for white mainstream audiences. When does it become a thing that white women want? I really think it's with the rise of social media because, you know, for so long, you know, as a white girl growing up reading magazines, there was only one body type and it was, you know, straight all the way down. Maybe if you were lucky, you got some boobs. Heroin chic was a term that described a type of image you were seeing a lot in fashion advertising. Models who were very, very thin. It wasn't a look

of health and happiness. And, you know, in the 2000s, maybe you had big boobs, but like, again, like having big boobs and a really small rest of your body is a very rare type of body type. And so it's still this like unattainable standard. Then when I think, you know, Instagram and social media sort of diversified the kind of bodies that we got to see, then, you know, the attention started being on the butt, which like historically white people have not really like traditionally cared much about. And they wanted, you know, white women wanted like a tight butt in like the 80s. But then, you know, we saw so many people with such great butts that were being celebrated by the fashion establishment, I guess, that it became desirable. And then I think that's after, you know, the Instagram

influencer kind of was the beauty ideal. That's when the BBL also became desirable. So what year do we start to see that translate into plastic surgery? So we know that the number of BBLs performed globally since 2015 has risen 77%. So it's a huge, huge rise from when Instagram and social media became really, really mainstream as in like the mid 2000s to now,

that's when we see like this explosive growth. And do we know who is getting the surgery? Is it largely white women or are we seeing women of color do it too? That we don't really know because so many of these operations are performed in these sort of random kind of shady clinics and they're very rarely performed, you know, in hospitals or anything like that. So you got people doing it, you know, in less official channels. So it's really, really hard to sort of verify the demographics of who is getting it. But we do know that BBLs are marketed largely to lower income women of color who, you know, you can get in and out. If you save up like $10,000, that's all you need to have like this perfect body. And then you can get in and out if you save up like ten thousand dollars that's all you need to have like this perfect body and then you can make more money on only fans or as like a stripper or

just be more confident in your body like naturally so it's very much targeting a certain working class women it's ironic isn't it that this surgery is marketed to the people who arguably have a big butt naturally have appreciated it for a long time, and then were also taunted for it. Is it like surgically enhanced butts are like becoming the box braids of cosmetic surgery? Oh my gosh. Just trying to follow like what is appropriation of what is gets so confusing because, you know, we have the sort of white appropriation of the typical like black and Latinx beauty standard. And then you have that repackaged again and sold to those same women. I think it's much more complicated than the box braids because

you can just take those out. You can't just take them out at BBL. Yeah. I guess the other thing that comes to mind, Rebecca, is that like we have celebrities like Cardi B talking really openly about her butt injections or her breast augmentation. I was desperate to have a bigger ass. And then almost every girl was going to this lady that was getting the shots and queens. And it's like, well, give me her number and hook me up. And you have people on TikTok saying, like, follow me on my cosmetic surgery journey. Is part of the rise in this procedure also that people are just being more honest about cosmetic procedure and the taboo around getting cosmetic procedures is kind of going away? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I also like cosmetic procedures are kind of going away? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And also, like, cosmetic procedures are absolutely on the rise. It's becoming much more normalized, partly because celebrities have been more open about it, partly because they're more available. They're more accessible. They're more affordable than they were before. Cosmetic surgeries are also, like, way more normalized in places around the world than they are in America. So I think it's a lot of different factors coming together. So if the number of BBLs are skyrocketing, does that mean that big butts are here to stay? Well, I mean, it's always so gross when like a certain body type of a woman is, you know,

trendy because, you know, we all have a body and we're all kind of stuck with it for better or worse. But what I have heard from plastic surgeons is that, you know, in the earlier years of the BBL, like the early 2010s when it became really popular, people wanted this very exaggerated look. They wanted like the smallest waist, the biggest butt. And now what he's saying or what they're saying is that people come in and want a much more subtle look. It's similar to the way that, you know that when breast augmentations became a really big deal in 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, in the early days, people thought that the only way to do a breast implant

was to make it really big and cartoonish. And then that made people in turn ask for that kind of look. And then when that became everywhere, then people wanted something more subtle. And I think that's what you see in most breast implants today. They're like, I don't want it to look fake. And that's kind of happening with the BBL. People come in and they're like, I don't want it to look fake. I just want it just a little bit and then just a little bit more here. So that's sort of where it's going. But yeah, I'm hoping that in the future, one body part won't necessarily get super trendy at all. I mean, I guess women's bodies are subject to, like, the same trends that, I don't know, houses or fashion or some other kind of commodity kind of is in our society. Yeah.

What comes next? Do we know what people are going for next? I mean, I definitely think there is going to be a lot like a huge skyrocketing of what stuff we can do to our faces, like anti-aging wise. And I think that's, you know, we're sort of living through this period where fillers and Botox are super, super normalized. And, you know, a ton of people like pretty much everybody in the public eye has some degree of work done. And because we're all also on social media, that trickles down really quickly to the rest of us. So I think like in the next few decades, we're just going to see some interesting approaches to anti-aging, I would say. Rebecca Jennings is a senior reporter for The Goods. It's Fox's vertical all about the things we buy and why we buy them. You can read her reporting on BBLs there. Special thanks to Hellie Larson for sharing her BBL journey.

You can find her on TikTok at Heli's Angel. Today's show was produced by Hadi Mawagdi, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Afim Shapiro. The rest of the Today Explained team includes Victoria Chamberlain, Will Reed, and Miles Bryan. Our supervising producer is Amina Alsadi. Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's vice president of audio. Jillian Weinberger is her deputy. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld, too. And Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Halima Shah. Sean Ramos-Furham will be back in the hosting chair on Monday. Thanks for listening. Thank you.