I’ve always wondered how someone with not a lot of skin in the area can suddenly enlarge their boobs. How do big implants fit into small boob zones and i’ve especially been wondering this with trans women who go from absolute flat chested to boobs, so please if anyone knows ELI5.
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Your skin and tissue has a natural amount of stretchiness to it and can expand over time, such as when you gain weight.
The surgeon will do an exam pre-op and determine how large an implant your body will support.
During the surgery the surgeon will make a pocket for the implant by stretching the surrounding tissues. The implant is then placed in the pocket and expanded by filling it with saline or silicone.
Putting too large an implant in can cause damage or stretch the skin too tight and thin which can cause all sorts of post operative problems.
People that want larger implants have to go through multiple procedures steadily increasing the size of their implants over several years as that gives the skin a chance to stretch and the body to heal.
Expanders can be used as well. These are basically balloons that are placed where a breast implant would go and are expanded by increasing the amount of fluid in them over a couple of months. This allows the skin to stretch naturally the same way it would if you were just gaining weight.
These are commonly used in women that have mastectomies.
Trans people can support breast implants without any additional procedures, the size of which they can support will depend on their size and weight.
Expanders can be used for them as well if required. One common side effect though is the tissue in between the breasts can separate from the breastbone.
Skin and the tissue underneath it are somewhat stretchy. They have to be to, say, let you bend your joints etc without having the skin get stuck and stopping you from bending things further. In addition, part of the surgery is releasing some of the attachments between the overlying skin/fat (or muscle) and the tissue underneath to create a space for the implant to go. This allows for much more movement and space for the implant to go in. However, it’s doesn’t create unlimited room, so plastic surgeons have to be careful about how large of implants can be fit. If needed, they can put in temporary implant spacers that can be filled with more and more fluid over time. The skin can then stretch more, allowing larger permanent implants to be put in later.
Trans women don’t need surgery to get boobs. They get them the same way cis women do, they just need help with the hormones.
As someone whose mom recently had a mastectomy and is getting reconstruction, if there’s not enough skin you can use something called tissue expanders that you place in the area you want to stretch. It’s basically like a balloon that you inject saline into over the course of a period of time to slowly stretch the skin and get it ready for implants
I’ll answer your question with a question of my own: how does all the fat in a 300 lb person have space? How does a woman who becomes naturally busty have space?
Answer: skin is stretchy, yo
Watch a video of the procedure, it’s borderline violence and quite shocking how the surgeon inserts the implants . Now I know why there’s such heavy bruising post op.
There is a limit to how much volume can be added before they stop looking natural and start looking artificially inflated. If they are very flat chested to begin with that limit is pretty small. Trans women don’t just go from flat to boobs over night, most of them take feminizing hormones for years before getting surgery if they even do get surgery. A lot of trans women are perfectly happy with the breasts they’re able to grow on the proper hormones so they just grow the same as anyone else’s breasts
How does it affect the fascia?
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Not sure about the implants and space, but many trans women actually don’t even need surgery to develop breasts. They can develop naturally on estrogen due to the fact that assigned male at birth bodies have everything they need to produce breasts, they just normally don’t have the hormones to start the process
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