A breast lift can raise your breasts and give them a rounder and firmer appearance.
As time passes, your breasts start losing some of their perkiness, firmness, and elasticity. Significant weight loss, pregnancy, and breastfeeding can speed up this process. A mastopexy can correct that.
Dr. Robert Schwartz offers his patients a variety of breast lift techniques at his plastic surgery facilities in Dallas, TX. If your breasts have started to sag or droop, you can get a mastopexy on its own or with implants to restore the youthful appearance of your breasts.
A breast lift, also known as mastopexy, is a cosmetic surgery that can lift your breasts into a perkier position. To do that, your surgeon raises the nipples and sagging breast skin into a higher position and then tightens the surrounding breast tissue. As you get older, you might experience some breast changes due to:
A breast lift is an operation that can correct these changes and restore a more youthful appearance to your breasts.
During your consultation, we'll discuss your aesthetic goals – how you hope your breasts will look after your breast lift and whether you'd be comfortable with the resulting scars.
After that, we'll determine which breast lift technique suits you best. We offer several breast lift techniques at our clinic in Dallas:
The crescent lift involves making a small incision at the upper edge of the areola and removing a moon-shaped wedge of skin.
This lift leaves minimal scarring (only part of a circle, usually from 10:00 to 2:00), but it can’t correct any significant breast sagging.
We rarely use the crescent because it's not effective.
The donut lift requires two circular incisions; one around the outer edge of the areola and another larger circle around it. The top of the larger circle is placed where the top of the areola should be.
Then, the skin between the two circles is removed, and the two incisions are stitched together, leaving behind only one circular scar around the areola.
This lift can raise the nipple (an inch or more), reduce the size of large areolas, and lift sagging tissue at the bottom of the breast, which makes it far more effective than the crescent lift.
he vertical lift involves two incisions; a circular incision around the areola and another vertical incision that runs down from the bottom edge of the areola to the bottom of the breast.
The additional vertical incision allows us to move the nipple and areola significantly higher and create a fuller breast appearance than with a Benelli lift.
The scars from the lollipop lift, however, are more visible than those from the donut lift. The vertical scar will fade over time and eventually become much less visible.
The vertical lift is our most popular lift because:
This lift starts the same as a vertical lift, but we make an extra incision to remove a wedge of skin and tissue from the bottom fold of the breast.
We use this technique less frequently than the vertical lift because it produces additional scarring – an extra horizontal scar under the breast.
The simplest way to decide whether you should get a breast lift, breast implants, or both is to consider what each procedure offers you.
A breast lift might be ideal for you in case:
On the other hand, you should consider getting breast implants if:
A third option would be combining a breast lift with breast implants in case your breasts hang low on the chest and lack fullness in the upper part.
Patients seeking breast lift surgery are usually women who have developed some degree of breast sagginess with age or following pregnancy and weight change.
A mastopexy might be ideal for you in case:
As for age, we've performed mastopexy on women from their 20s to their 70’s. So as long as you're healthy and a non-smoker, you can be a candidate for a breast lift procedure.
Breast lift results are virtually permanent; they don't have an expiry date. If you get a mastopexy, in 30 years, your breasts will still look better than they would look had you not gotten the surgery.
With that said, a breast lift cannot stop your body's natural aging process; your breasts will continue to age after the surgery. Therefore, some patients may need to revisit the mastopexy 10-20 years after the procedure, but that doesn't happen often.
Some things can increase the likelihood of needing a revision breast lift, such as:
Otherwise, it's not common to need to revisit a mastopexy down the road.
Several things will help you get ready for a breast lift:
Age:
40 - 49
Gender:
Female
Ethnicity:
Hispanic
Height:
Undisclosed
Weight:
Undisclosed
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A breast lift is a day procedure – you can leave the same day and recover safely at home. It's performed under general anesthesia in most cases, but some breast lifts, particularly mini lifts, can be done under local anesthesia.
Before the surgery, we'll mark your breasts where your incisions will be. Once you're asleep under general anesthesia:
After your mastopexy:
Here's what you can expect during your breast lift recovery:
All in all, a breast lift is an effective procedure that can give you beautiful young-looking breasts but also leaves some degree of scarring. You should carefully weigh the pros and cons in your head and then decide whether this surgery can give you breasts you're confident with and proud of. We offer our patients in Dallas, Texas, all the different types of breast lift surgery, and accompany them through a rapid and seamless recovery - every step of the way.
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Dr. Robert Schwartz is the founder and director of Robert Schwartz Plastic Surgery in Dallas, TX. He is certified by the American board of Plastic Surgery and member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. He graduated from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles, CA and has been in practice for over 20 years. Dr. Schwartz is gifted with a keen eye and the unique skill to visualize you at your best, and he will execute that vision throughout every phase of your treatment to consistmently deliver stunning results. This is what makes him a world-class plastic surgeon.
No, though this is a widely-held misconception. In all common breast lifts, the nipples remain attached to the breast at all times. The nipples are temporarily removed from the breasts in some extremely large-volume breast reductions.
We perform our breast lifts at a JCAHO-certified ambulatory surgery center.
A breast lift (mastopexy) is a surgical procedure to improve the appearance of sagging breasts. This is done by tightening the breast skin and re-shaping the internal breast tissue. After a breast lift, the breasts are positioned higher on the chest and the nipples are positioned higher on the breasts. We usually also reduce the diameter of the areolas if they have become overly large.
Women who have experienced sagging of their breasts are candidates for a breast lift. Most commonly, the sagging has been caused by pregnancy and breast-feeding. Other frequent causes are weight changes and aging. Candidates for breast lifting should be willing to accept surgical scars on the breasts in exchange for improved shape and appearance.
Breast lifts are cosmetic procedures. It would be very unusual for an insurer to cover this procedure.
This is a situation that often occurs after breast-feeding. Loss of breast tissue after lactation makes the breasts look deflated even though the breasts and the nipples haven’t dropped much. Most often, this problem can be corrected without a breast lift. Placement of breast implants to restore the lost volume will usually produce a pretty and natural-appearing result.
Breast lift scars result from the removal of skin to tighten the breasts. Wherever the remaining skin is closed together, a scar results. Though we use plastic surgery techniques to minimize scarring, any woman contemplating a breast lift should assume that the resulting scars will always be visible (when she is undressed) to some degree. There is no scarless breast lift.
The scars from a traditional breast lift are usually described as an “anchor” pattern. They consist of a circle around the areola, a line from the bottom of the areola to the bottom of the breast and a curved line in the crease below the breast. We rarely need to perform this extensive lift.
Our most common lift is the vertical mastopexy. This procedure eliminates the long scar in the breast crease. The circular scar around the areola remains. The vertical scar starts just below the areola but does not always extend all the way to the bottom of the breast. The vertical mastopexy is a versatile lift and yields pretty results in a wide variety of women.
For women who require only a mild amount of lifting, we perform a Benelli mastopexy. This mini-lift eliminates all scars except for the circular one around the areola.
Though everyone’s response to pain is different, most patients do not find breast lifts particularly painful. The discomfort is usually short-lived and well-controlled with oral pain medications.
Most types of exercise can be restarted 3-4 weeks after a breast lift. Performing physically strenuous activities earlier than this can impair healing.
Most women can resume driving one week after a breast lift.
Most women with desk jobs can return to work in 4-7 days. Women with more physically demanding jobs will require a longer recuperation.
Your breast lift will be performed under general anesthesia (i.e. you will be asleep). We use only board-certified physician anesthesiologists.
We will usually perform breast augmentation and lifting at the same time in women who need and want both procedures. Sometimes the procedures will need to be separated if there is marked asymmetry, very advanced sagging, or health issues that prevent a single-stage procedure. The wait between stages is usually three to six months.
Many women will benefit from the placement of a modest-sized breast implant in conjunction with their breast lift. The implant adds shaping and firmness to the breast. Most importantly, the implant helps to restore fullness to the upper part of the breast. There are no breast lifting techniques that effectively and reliably restore upper breast fullness without an implant.
Not all women will want or need breast implants with their lift. In most cases, though, the breasts will look perkier and prettier if an implant is added.
What can someone do to stop lactating? There is a drug called Bromocriptine (Parlodel) that stops lactation. If a patient is interested in using it, she should discuss it with her Ob/Gyn or family doctor. The drug has potential side effects and is usually used only when lactation doesn't cease on its own and is troublesome.
Sore throat can happen after surgery. It is usually caused by the endotracheal tube the anesthesiologist uses to help you breath. It is somewhat more common in women than in men. The soreness is usually mild and goes away within a few days. A severe sore throat or one that lasts for more than a few days should be reported to Dr. Schwartz.
Donating blood causes a temporary anemia. This usually corrects within 1-2 weeks. Nonetheless, we recommend that patients do not donate blood for at least one month before cosmetic surgery.
Some patients have expressed interest in donating blood for their own use, if needed. Since most cosmetic procedures are designed to produce minimal to moderate blood loss, transfusion is almost never needed. While you are, of course, free to self-donate blood, this would almost always be unnecessary.
*Individual results are not guaranteed and may vary from person to person.
