You’ve heard of the Vampire facial, but have you heard of the Vampire Breast Lift?
Yep,
It seems like there’s a new beauty treatment that involves blood injection, but this time it’s not your face but your chest.
According to an article on the Dailymail UK,
The so-called ‘vampire breast lift’ is the sister of the age-defying vampire facelift (in which extracted blood is injected into the face, plumping skin), made famous by celebrity devotees.
One woman who tried the new version was beauty therapist Terry Armstrong, 52. Having shed four stone, she found her cleavage had lost its va-va-voom.
‘I went from size 16 to a size 12 last year, and my breasts suddenly looked empty and flat,’ says Terry, a mother-of-two from Woking, Surrey. ‘I was still a 30FF, but I had to invest in sturdy bras to lift my bust. Despite the weight loss, I felt less confident than ever before.’
Unwilling to try anything as invasive as a boob job, Terry decided to try the vampire lift after a friend recommended it. Compared to surgery, the technique is relatively painless and involves no knives or implants.
Taking no more than an hour, it costs around £1,000 – significantly less recovery time and expense than a £4,000 boob job. Although it cannot increase cup size and the effect tends to wear off after two years, the treatment is billed as ideal for those with a deflated decolletage due to weight loss, breastfeeding or gravity taking its toll.
But the pioneering technique is not without its detractors. Apart from the ‘slight risk’ of infection, consultant plastic surgeon Graham Offer, a council member of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, worries about stimulating cell growth in an area of the body where one in eight women suffer cancer.
‘The idea is that it plumps up the tissue but if there is a latent cancer cell in that area, what’s to say it won’t stimulate the growth of that cell, too? So far there is no safety data on this procedure,’ he says.
Yet Terry could not be dissuaded. In September, she made an appointment with London-based cosmetic doctor Dr Sherif Elwakil, who has been offering this procedure for two years.
Once in the clinic, a syringe-full of blood was taken from Terry’s arm and put into a centrifuge – a machine that spins it around at high speed for around 15 minutes until the red and white blood cells have separated. The process produces plasma rich with platelet cells, which stimulate cell growth.
After an anaesthetic was applied to Terry’s skin, this plasma was then re-injected into her breasts.
‘My breasts immediately look more full and rounded,’ she says. ‘There was a little bruising afterwards but it wasn’t sore at all.’
