It doesn’t take a genius to know that Kim Kardashian West, Nicki Minaj and Jennifer Lopez have changed America’s body aesthetics.
“Behind-sight” is, after all, 20-20.
But what is less known is that US women, in an attempt to get a bountiful backside like their pop culture heroes, are packing plastic-surgery clinics in such numbers that the two types of butt augmentation procedures — implant and lifts — in 2014 became the No. 2 and No. 3 fastest-growing types of plastic surgery in the country, according to data compiled by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
And 2015 is shaping up to be another busy year for doctors as demand for the two procedures “is definitely still growing,” according to a spokeswoman for the ASPS, who said official 2015 data won’t be available until mid-January.
The uptick in demand for butt augmentation procedures couldn’t come at a better time for doctors in the specialty as four of the five most popular procedures — including boob jobs, eyelid surgery and facelifts — are declining.
n 2014, butt implant procedures rose 98 percent, to 1,863 cases, and butt lifts were up 44 percent, to 2,438 cases, industry data shows.
Dr. Matthew Schulman, a board-certified plastic surgeon, expects to augment more than 300 butts this year — up 20 percent from 2014,, which was up 35 percent from 2013.
Schulman’s specialty is the Brazilian butt lift, where fat is taken via liposuction from areas where patients least want it — say, the stomach or thighs — and re-injected in their diminutive derrières.
The procedure runs about $13,000.
While the doctor’s celebrity-heavy business has certainly, ahem, picked up in the past couple of years, he could have been even busier if he also performed butt implants — a procedure he chooses not to do out of concern that solid silicone, once placed in the body, is prone to infections and unwanted relocations.
Of course, for some women a butt implant is the only way to go because they have no fat to re-distribute.
Schulman claims Big Apple women are so butt-conscious that he has become the most prolific butt augmenter in the Northeast. The 3-to-3 ¹/₂ hours needed for each of his Brazilian butt lifts, however, has him close to being “maxed out.”
Patients often bring in wish-pics — photos of women whose butts they would most like theirs to mimic — and the most referenced rumps are those belonging to Kardashian West (“big, with projection”), Minaj (“big hips, too”) and Lopez (“big and muscular”), although Sofía Vergara (“proportionate voluptuousness”) and Jessica Biel (“perky and bubbly”) are frequently cited, too, Schulman said.
While most of his butt augmentation patients are young, Schulman does see plenty of what he calls “Upper East Side soccer moms” who come in for the “mommy makeover” — which could include a butt augmentation along with a tummy tuck, breast lift and liposuction.
Mommy makeovers can run $17,500, Schulman said.
Yet Schulman knows better than to think his big-booty business will last forever.
“In 10 years,” he says, “we may go back to the slim athletic look that dominated five years ago.”
