There is a point during our conversation when Christina Escamilla hesitates. In the scene she’s describing, Christina – or Tina, as she goes by on TikTok – is just minutes away from an operation that she’s been planning for over a year now, one that she’s convinced will vastly improve her quality of life.
Yesterday, she stepped off a plane, after a three-hour flight, and checked into a recovery home where she will spend the next seven days. Now, she’s alone in an unfamiliar room, “waiting, and waiting,” she says. “I sent voice notes to my mum and sister and my son,” Christina, 35, continues. “I told them, I love you. If anything happens, I love you.”
Perhaps that sounds dramatic for one of the most popular procedures in the world right now. The Aesthetic Society reports that there were more than 40,000 BBL, or Brazilian Butt Lift, surgeries in 2020 alone and, while liposuction and breast augmentations still vastly outweigh the numbers, they’re rising fast. Browse Instagram or TikTok and you might get the impression that the procedure – which involves liposuction to remove fat, which is then injected back into the buttocks to give a fuller effect – is even more common; standard, even. Yet, headlines from the last few years tell a different story.
Rather, the BBL is now considered the world’s most dangerous cosmetic procedure, with one report published by the Aesthetic Society in 2017 estimating that one in 3000 surgeries results in death. In the last few years, three British women – Leah Cambridge, 29, from West Yorkshire, Abimbola Ajoke Bamgbose, 38, of Dartford, Kent, and Melissa Kerr, 31, from Norfolk – have all died through complications of BBL surgeries performed in Turkey, dubbed the capital of medical tourism.
Patients undergoing the surgery are at risk of death if fat is accidentally injected into large veins. If this occurs, the fat can travel up to the heart, lungs or brain (a fat embolism).
“I remember them telling me that we were going to get started with the operation,” Christina, a hospital volunteer coordinator from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who paid $6100USD (£4600) says, “and then I remember waking up on my stomach … I compared the pain to childbirth. I shot a video immediately and the first thing I said was, don’t get a BBL. Don’t do it. Go to the gym, it’s not worth it.”
One of the main things Christina looked for when choosing her surgeon was that they’d had “zero deaths”; she was well aware of the risks that come with the search for a perfect bum. For a few years prior to electing for surgery, she’d been feeling self-conscious and low about her shape. She’d actually tried working out, she says, but found that her weight loss left her bum flatter than before. Eventually, after settling on a clinic in Miami she had the op in August 2021.
“Imagine that you could have everything you ever wanted, but you might have to risk everything to get it,” Chad Teixeira, who lives in Mayfair, London, is telling me. He is a 26-year-old PR who, after a lifetime of battling weight issues and insecurity about his body, underwent a complex BBL and extensive liposuction surgery, plus a tummy tuck, back in February 2021.