Just like death and taxes, the sagginess of the breasts is an inevitable fact of life. Women can count on the fact that sooner or later, their breasts will start sagging lower on the chest wall and the breasts will lose their firmness and beautiful shape. It is true that for bigger breasts, the condition has an early onset while for patients with smaller breasts, breast ptosis can be delayed until later on in life.
Saggy breasts are a sign of old age as this is when the skin loses elasticity and the ligaments of the breasts become too distended to hold the breasts in an elevated position. It is not a pleasant look for a woman of a rather young age to be confronted with breast ptosis. However, it happens more often than you think.
Breast ptosis can also occur after weight fluctuations, pregnancies and breastfeeding, also as a result of a genetic predisposition and other factors. Even something as simple as not wearing the right type and size of bra can cause breast ptosis.
Many women try different methods to make their breasts perky again before understanding that plastic surgery is the only efficient method. However, even after they understand that plastic surgery holds the key to new and perkier breasts, they tend to believe that it is breast augmentation surgery that will deliver the results they expect. Unfortunately, this is not true.
Breast augmentation surgery is performed with the aim of making the breasts bigger, rounder, and fuller. The procedure often uses silicone implants to add more volume to the breasts. This means that the plastic surgeon will make your breasts bigger, not more elevated on the chest wall. Moreover, you should know that when adding more volume to the breasts, breast ptosis might become even more accentuated, especially if it is already severe.
This result is easy to notice in the case of patients who had implants inserted with the transaxillary incision when they were already confronted with breast ptosis. The breasts still look like they have an empty upper pole and it is quite obvious where the implants were inserted. If the implants are positioned in the submuscular placement, it can even look like the patient has two breasts, one high on the chest wall (the implant) and one lower on the thorax (the actual glandular tissue).
In few words, breast augmentation can’t correct moderate to severe breast ptosis, but it can certainly accentuate it. Breast lift is the procedure recommended to correct this imperfection. If the patient wants to get bigger breasts aside from being elevated on the chest wall, the breast lift procedure can be performed with implants as well.
The only time when implants can correct breast ptosis is when the implants have a moderate size and they are inserted into breasts suffering from minor breast ptosis, where the nipple is at the level of the inframammary fold.