Fat Grafting to Breasts: Benefits and Limitations
Posted November 24, 2025 in Breast Augmentation, Fat Grafting
By Dr. Christopher Patronella
One of the more common requests today is women who come in for a consultation who are looking for fat grafting to the breasts instead of implants. Some of those patients are women who’ve had implants and no longer want them, or they are experiencing a variety of symptoms and feel the implants are a cause of this, and, therefore, they want to eliminate their implants as a potential source of issues.
So what do we do in that circumstance? Most of the time, I will do a breast lift if the implant is removed. And we can also add fat, taken from another area of the body and placed in the breasts. What most women want is upper pole fullness after any kind of breast surgery. They want fullness at the top where this is absent when the breasts sag.
Sometimes the native tissue, that is a woman’s tissue, will support that and allow for upper pole fullness. Other times we need an implant to create that. And sometimes we can use fat grafting to achieve that objective as was done for the patient in this video. For her, I did a breast lift and added fat in the upper pole. In the oblique preoperative view, you can see where fullness is absent in the upper part of the breast and much fuller after fat grafting to this area was performed. It’s not as full as an implant would be. And that’s perhaps the limitation of fat grafting to the breasts.
Fat grafting can restore a more natural appearance than an implant typically would. Yet it doesn’t give quite the amount of volume you would see with an implant. So that can be a limitation that would lead some women to say, “No, I’d rather have an implant.”
But fat transfer is a great replacement for an implant in circumstances where the implant has been removed and/or it’s a great way to supplement the size of the breasts when a woman is apprehensive about having an implant or is looking for a very conservative change such as a one cup size increase.
What are the benefits of fat grafting to the breasts?
Fat is very safe. It is your own tissue. We only need a source for that tissue—that is an area of the body where some unwanted fat is present, and we can improve that area at the same time. It’s perhaps not as ideal in the very thin woman who doesn’t have any extra fat that.can be used for fat grafting. But most of the time, I can find enough fat somewhere on the body which can be the source of grafting for the breasts.
How Much Fat Remains in a Fat Grafting to the Breasts Procedure?
Many patients will ask, “How much of the fat that you put in is going to stay around?” There have been some studies on this, yet there is an unpredictability factor that we can’t guarantee. In plastic surgery, we feel that about 60 to 70 percent of the fat that we transfer will stay.
What are the factors that effect the amount of fat that stays? One is the volume of fat that is placed in a confined space. If we are placing fat in a space like the breasts, we have to make sure that we’re not overwhelming the breasts with fat where the fat cell, if you will, is not sitting next to a normal cell where blood vessels can grow into the fat and help it survive.
So it’s important to be relatively conservative with the amount of fat that we place in a confined space so we can enhance the take of that fat. And if it’s done that way, then I think 60 to 70 percent of the fat will stay around. For this reason, I prefer to do fat grafting when the goal of the procedure is to enhance the breasts or add no more than one cup size to the breasts. If a woman desires an increase of two or three cup sizes, it really is necessary to use an implant.
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