There's a new plastic surgery trend, and it's, dare we say, coming to get you, Barbra...
The internet has dubbed it "zombie filler," and it involves injecting fat, not from yourself, but from a corpse. More specifically, a donated human body, or cadaver.
Fat transfers have long been a staple of plastic surgery, used in facial rejuvenations, breast augmentations and Brazilian butt lifts, or BBLs. Usually, they involve moving fat from one part of a patient's body to another.
However, in the age of Ozempic and other GLP-1s, plastic surgeons say patients now often have too little fat of their own. So they're turning to other sources.
"It's not discarded liposuction fat, or anything like that. It's actually from cadavers," says Dr. Anthony Rossi, a dermatologist
and surgeon in New York. "So 'zombie' is apropos, because these people are dead. I mean, it's kind of dark humor."
How exactly did we enter the Night of the Living BBL? Let's take a look.
What is 'zombie filler'?
According to Rossi, people have gravitated toward "zombie filler" for a variety of reasons. The first is that it's seen as a more natural alternative to other popular fillers, like hyaluronic acid. It also tends to have faster results than other forms of filler, he adds.
"Because of all the overfilling that we've seen in the past with traditional fillers, people got filler fatigue," Rossi says. "There was a big backlash about how people look overfilled, or 'Instagram face.' So a lot of what's coming out is talking about tissue regeneration and building your own tissue and more of a regenerative approach, which is what's in vogue right now."
Though zombie filler has become more popular over the past couple years, the concept isn't new. Dr. Luis Macias, a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles, says zombie filler has been around for more than a decade, but it previously was too expensive to break into the mainstream.
Now, thanks to more options at cheaper prices, zombie filler has become more accessible and talked about.
"It was very cost-prohibitive to use it in larger volumes, although there were people in Hollywood who had the funds and the means and the wants to spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for augmentation of their breasts or buttocks with it," Macias says.
The people who seek out zombie filler tend to have very little body fat of their own. For some, particularly those who struggle to put on weight, zombie filler has made cosmetic procedures that were previously out of reach possible.
"The ideal candidate would be somebody that has no body fat," says Dr. Timothy Katzen, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, California.
How GLP-1s fueled 'zombie filler'
Another big factor behind the rise of zombie filler, plastic surgeons say, is the GLP-1 boom.
These weight loss medications have caused people to lose fat, sometimes at a rapid rate. But losing fat too quickly, doctors say, can have aesthetic ramifications. Plastic surgeons previously told USA TODAY about the rise of "temporal hollowing" − or loss of volume in the temples − as a result of, and often the misuse of, GLP-1s.
A lot of these patients, doctors say, see zombie filler as a way to restore volume in parts of their face where rapid fat loss has given them a more aged appearance.
"People are losing large quantities of weight with GLP-1s, and they're losing a lot of fat. So not only are they losing fat in the abdomen area, like the belly, but they're also losing it in their face, their arms, their butt," Rossi says. "The purpose of rejuvenation, especially with facial rejuvenation, is to preserve those fat pads and also replace them, because that's what gives us a youthful appearance."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: People are injecting fat from dead bodies. It’s called ‘zombie filler’
