Everyone fantasizes from time to time about what they’d love to change about their appearance. If your plastic surgery wish list is as long as your grocery list, though, you might want to consider more complex procedures.
Let’s say you’re unhappy with excess sagging skin on your abdomen, hips, buttocks, and thighs. You could have a separate surgery on each area, but it would be a long and expensive process. A lower body lift, on the other hand, can treat it all in fewer procedures and at a lower cost.
Unless you’re reading this from a mansion, you’ll probably need to budget for your surgery. Here’s what you need to know about your lower body lift cost.
How Much Will My Lower Body Lift Cost?
As you already know, medical procedures don’t have set price tags like clothes and cosmetics. There are countless factors that can affect the cost of your procedure, but the cost tends to range from $10,000-$17,000.
What Factors Affect the Price of My Lower Body Lift?
While it might help to have a price range, that range is rather large. How do you know whether your procedure will clock in at the low end or the high end?
As with most medical procedures, there are a variety of factors that can affect your lower body lift costs.
Amount of Excess Skin
The primary goal for a lower body lift is to remove excess skin. The more skin you need to have removed, the more time it will take to get the right contours throughout your lower body.
In most cases, this excess sagging skin comes from extreme weight loss. The fat beneath your skin has shrunk, but the skin may not be able to constrict enough to stay firm on your new, leaner figure.
Every patient who loses a large amount of weight has a different amount of excess skin. The younger you are, the more elastic your skin will be. However, if you’ve “yo-yoed” up and down before reaching your goal weight, you may have more unwanted skin. Of course, it also depends on how much weight you’ve lost and how fast the process was.
Excess Fat Removal
Sometimes the excess skin isn’t the only problem. In many cases, the remaining fat beneath needs to be sculpted to achieve the results you want.
For these patients, liposuction fat removal is used during the same procedure as the lower body lift. While this can contribute to more comprehensive results, it also adds to the cost of the surgery.
Location
This is a simple factor but it’s easy for patients to miss. Where you have your procedure can make a tremendous difference in price. In the same way that rent costs more in California than in Indiana, so does plastic surgery.
Surgeon and Facility
Most patients don’t realize this, but there are several different costs involved in plastic surgery. The major costs include the surgeon’s fee, the operating room or facility fee, and the anesthesia fee.
It should come as no surprise that the more experienced a surgeon is, the higher their fees tend to be. The same holds true for surgical facilities. Chances are that you’ll pay more for a well-appointed and well-cared-for surgical center.
How Many Procedure Are Involved
Not everyone’s lower body lift goes the same way. For some patients, the surgery needs to happen in a few stages to get the best results.
As much of a difference as this can make in your results, it does add to the cost. A second surgery means another round of surgical facility fees and anesthesia fees.
This is also the case for patients who want other procedures on top of a lower body lift. If you’ve lost a large amount of weight, chances are that you also have sagging skin on your upper arms. Women sometimes want a breast lift after major weight loss as well.
To make your surgery as safe and successful as possible, there’s a limit to the amount of time you should spend under anesthesia. For this reason, multiple surgical sessions may be necessary for patients who want several of these procedures.
Medications and Medical Tests
Before your surgery, you will need to see your general practitioner for a variety of tests to make sure you’re healthy enough. Some patients need more tests than others, depending on their medical history.
In addition to your pre-surgical medical tests, you will also need prescription medications. These can include pain medications as well as antibiotics to prevent infections. Some patients may need additional prescriptions or over the counter medicines due to their medical history.
Follow-up Treatments
Some patients expect that when they’ve recovered from surgery, they’ll have their dream physique. In some cases, it takes a few additional steps to get the results you want.
As with any surgery, a lower body lift will cause scars. While we make them as discrete as possible, it’s understandable that many patients want to minimize those scars further.
There are a variety of procedures that can reduce surgical scars, like laser treatments and micro needling. Of course, these procedures have their own costs on top of your surgery.
Some patients also seek future procedures to maintain their results. For instance, let’s say you later develop an unwanted “pooch” on your abdomen or you develop “love handles.” Liposuction may be able to resolve these issues to help you love your results again.
As you age, you may also see your skin sag. It won’t get back to its pre-surgical state unless you gain and lose a large amount of weight again. However, many patients want to keep their skin firm to maintain those results they enjoyed. In this case, non-surgical skin tightening procedures could help.
Budgeting for Your Lower Body Lift
Cost is an inevitable aspect of plastic surgery. It’s important not to extend yourself beyond your financial comfort, but you also shouldn’t make surgical decisions based on price alone. After all, saving money by choosing an inexperienced or unqualified surgeon isn’t worth risking your health or your results.
Even with all these variables, most patients find that their lower body lift cost is well worth their ability to enjoy the leaner, healthier body they’ve won with all their hard work.
To get a more specific cost for your unique surgery, schedule a plastic surgery consultation.