A new kind of bank has been set up by one entrepreneurial plastic surgeon in Seminole County, USA, which could see people really making the most of their assets.
The Liquid Gold Center stores fat removed from patients during liposuction and freezes it potentially for the patient’s lifetime, thereby allowing it to be used at a later date for such procedures as filling out wrinkles and increasing the size of breasts.
The ‘fat bank’ uses a patented process which adds ‘protectants’ to the harvested fat before slowly freezing it to minus 192 celsius. To store approximately a coffee cup size amount of fat costs $900 for the first year of storage and $200 the following year.
Owner of the centre, Dr Jeffrey Hartog, states that the benefits of doing this are that the patient only has to go under general anaesthetic once. Speaking to the Orlando Sentinel newspaper, Dr Hartog said: “Having their fat in the bank would allow patients to draw on it later, when they want to plump up body parts that have succumbed to age.”
However, others are more sceptical. Dr Daniel Del Vecchio, a plastic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, who has studied fat transfer on animals, believes that frozen fat does not hold up as well as fresh fat.
