Breast Surgery, Augmented

Is "internal bra" surgery the stuff that braless dreams are made of?

- Kathleen Hou

There's a $65 candle inspired by a unique feeling (and it's not love). Scented with bamboo and thyme blossom, it's meant to capture the euphoric sensation of arriving home after a long day and flinging off your bra-move over, Baies, it's all about Braless. That elusive feeling is difficult enough to evoke in a candle, but a surgery? Yet that's what the "internal bra," a procedure that's become more popular in recent years, might bring to mind-perhaps along with the lyrics to Wicked's "Defying Gravity." In actuality, doctors offer more nuance on the subject.

The "internal bra" refers to the process of surgically inserting a material into your body for breast support-sometimes called "mesh" as shorthand, although that's not a scientific term, explains Rady Rahban, MD, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. A more accurate term might be "scaffolding." Surgeons can find the approach helpful in a variety of breast surgeries, ranging from breast lifts (mastopexies) to reductions, reconstructions, or augmentations, in helping to preserve results for a longer period of time.

"Listen, this is serious, Kathleen," plastic surgeon Bruce Van Natta, MD, tells me over the phone from his office in Indianapolis. "I've got patients in their seventies that we've done breast lifts on, and they don't need to wear a bra." William P. Adams Jr., MD, a Dallas plastic surgeon, adds that while effects are not permanent, adding a so-called internal bra to a breast surgery "probably doubles the length of time that something lasts." Both doctors were part of the initial U.S. pilot program for a substance called GalaFLEX.