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Breast Implant Sizing

Picking the right size implant is a tough thing for women seeking breast augmentation. The majority of women in my practice state that they do not want to go too big. But I have found that everyone has a different concept of what constitutes “too big”. My goal is to match a woman with her desired outcome. And certainly we hate to see a woman go through the procedure and wish she was bigger. So picking a breast implant is a process we spend a lot of time going over with the patient.

The final breast volume will be a sum of the native breast tissue plus the implant. And while everyone can look on the internet and see a result they like, knowing the volume of the implant is only half of the story.

The reason why is because I try to match the width of the implant to the width of the breast. And there are a variety of breast widths. So just because a person’s friend got so many cc’s, and looks great, that may not apply to that person, because comparing her to her friend may be like comparing apples to oranges if they have different widths (and different amounts of starting tissue).

And so narrower breasts will require less volume than wider breasts to get a similar look in different women.

For a given width, then, we try to determine if a woman wants low, medium, or high profile implants (they may have slightly different names). At a given width, the three different profiles have different projections but the same diameter. So the lowest profile is flatter, and the highest profile is more round. This is true in both saline implants and silicone implants.

Here is an example of a woman who got 800cc high profile silicone implants–the largest volume made.

While this may be larger than another individual may desire, it is certainly not overdone. For her frame they fit very nicely. But in another woman they might be too big. A woman with a narrower breast might get a similar look with a much smaller implant.

And this is only at 3 months…they ought to settle a little bit more over time, causing the upper pole to be less convex while the lower pole expands a little bit.