A living bra is a breast augmentation technique performed at Advanced Concepts in Plastic Surgery in Sacramento designed to give you the most support, the most natural padding, and the best feeling breast possible. This system of performing breast augmentation uses your own muscles to create coverage and support for an implant. To show how this works, these figures will demonstrate the principles and power of muscle support.

Your anatomy: The chest muscles are directly under the breast. Usually the pectoralis muscle only goes to the nipple level and the other muscles cover below this. The rectus and external oblique muscles cover the middle and laterally toward the side. The serratus muscle covers the rib cage. During plastic surgery, these muscles can be used to create a living bra as a part of breast augmentation surgery.

During breast augmentation, when breast implants are put over the muscle, just under the breast there is no support underneath. Sometimes this works well, but with larger breast implants, this may cause bottoming out. Bottoming out refers to a situation where the bottom part of the breast becomes fuller than the top after breast augmentation. Also, wrinkles and ripples can be more obvious anywhere in the breast because of the lack of coverage of the breast implant itself.

One solution to this problem is to put the silicone breast implant or saline breast implant under the pectoralis muscle. This prevents upper-half wrinkling and rippling but doesn’t do that for the lower half especially on the side. The upper muscle does support the implant, but there is no muscular support on the bottom, therefore exposing the implant.

A better solution for support and coverage is the living bra. The breast implant is placed under all of the muscles of the chest: pectoralis, rectus, external oblique and serratus. After the implant is placed a relaxing incision is made toward the middle and bottom of the pocket. The muscles on the side help to cup and contour the implant for the best padding and support.

Dr. Kaczynski prefers the living bra method of securing both silicone implants and saline implants at his plastic surgery center so that they achieve the most natural effect after breast augmentation.