Surgical flair for the derriere

When U.S. women want a Brazilian Butt Lift, they head for Beverly Hills.

By Annette John-Hall

Inquirer Staff Writer

Belen Rodriguez asked the doctor to put it all behind her. Now she anxiously awaited to see if he had.

As one of the patients selected for Extreme Makeover, ABC's hit reality show, Rodriguez had already undergone an eyebrow lift, nose refinement, lip augmentation and chin liposuction at the skilled hands of plastic surgeon Anthony C. Griffin. Her new face thrilled her.

Now, within the confines of Griffin's Beverly Hills office, it was time for Rodriguez to see the rest of the package.

Her tucked tummy stared back at her, taut and flat. Fabulous. But her backside, after its Brazilian Lift? Not what she expected. She had asked for Beyoncé's booty, and it looked as if Griffin had given her Serena's.

Concerned, Rodriguez told the doctor, "There's a little too much junk in the trunk."

"That's just the swelling. It'll go down," Griffin assured.

Three days later, Rodriguez took another look at her newest natural resource.

"Oh my God," she gasped with delight.

"Oh, yeah! Boom boom!" concurred Griffin, eyeing his apple-bottom artistry.

Rodriguez's tush, which presurgery had been "OK, but a little square," is now "spectacular," she reports.

"At first it looked more round like Beyoncé's but now," a year after surgery, "it looks more bubbly, like J.Lo's... . I have to do more squats to get it like Beyoncé's." Nevertheless, she says, "My husband says I'm bootylicious now!"

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), nose jobs, liposuction and breast augmentation rank first, second and third as the most-requested cosmetic surgeries for women.

But go inside Griffin's "operating theater" at the Cosmetic Surgery Institute in Beverly Hills, and you'll see patients, uh, backed up for his exclusive services. That's because Griffin, 44, is the foremost surgeon in the United States performing the Brazilian Butt Lift.

That doesn't mean the doctor isn't adept at other procedures. He is coy about whom he has done, but offered a hint: "Look on the cover of any major magazine. Any [African American] celebrity on there, I've done."

Vivica Fox? Queen Latifah?

Griffin admits he didn't invent derriere design. That distinction goes to the freewheeling Brazilians (hence the name), who have been performing lifts on their thong-wearing patients for 25 years. Griffin says his surgery is safer. He doesn't use gluteal implants because of potential infection, choosing instead to do buttock lipo - taking fat from elsewhere in the body and creating a bigger, higher, more sculpted rear end. Aesthetically, he sees himself as an artist. "You have to be a 'bootyologist,' a sculptor," Griffin says. "You just can't put fat back there."

Whether the desire for a bangin' booty is driven by the generously endowed celebrities who got it and flaunt it, or hip-hop's rallying cry to "drop it like it's hot," or simply a woman's need for body "balance," patients of all stripes pay from $10,000 to $15,000 for Griffin's magic.

The doctor, who readily discloses his own renovations ("upper and lower eyelids done, bags removed") is doing, on average, one lift a week.

"Everybody wants a sistah booty," he says.

Yet some surgeons are skeptical about Griffin's method.

Mark Solomon, a Bala Cynwyd plastic surgeon, says less invasive measures are preferable.

For example, Solomon says, "a woman who comes in for a buttock augmentation may just need liposuction on her hips and thighs to accentuate the buttocks."

Nevertheless, Griffin says that many white and Asian women covet ample behinds. So do many black women, who feel slighted if they don't have that one physical attribute that many consider a birthright.

In fact, it was a black police officer who initially approached Griffin about having the procedure in 1998. The Los Angeles woman was as flat as a pancake and was constantly getting teased. "She said, 'I have a lot of fat anyway. Can you put it in my butt?' " Griffin recalls. "I told her, 'As a matter of fact I can, and if you don't like it, you can always take it out.' "

In Philadelphia for the ASPS conference recently, Griffin couldn't get through the Convention Center without colleagues stopping him to say hello or nodding in respectful recognition.

Little did Griffin realize, as a kid growing up in Kenosha, Wis., that reading an Ebony magazine article on plastic surgeons would set his career path and make him a TV star.

He received his undergraduate degree at Brown University and went to medical school at Washington University in St. Louis.

He never sought fame. He just happened to be at his dentist's office the day Extreme Makeover was shooting a segment. The show offers a team of surgeons, dermatologists, dentists, fashion and makeup experts to transform willing candidates.

Griffin said his dentist, William Dorfman, who was already part of the TV medical team, told the producers, "This guy needs to be on the show."

Extreme Makeover's ratings spiked during Griffin's episodes last season. Not only did the doctor take on the most challenging cases, but his transformation of sisters with cleft palates last season is considered one of the show's most successful.

Now limos pick him up, and he gets the best tables at restaurants. He recently participated in a skit that spoofed Extreme Makeover on this year's Emmys telecast with host Garry Shandling. He's pondering whether to do a cameo on an episode of FX's drama Nip/Tuck.

Griffin's success is partially due to his vast experience in treating patients of color. The author of Surgery Without Scars: A Worry-Free, Multi-Cultural Guide to Plastic Surgery Today, Griffin was aware of the medical issues as well as the cultural anxieties.

Though darker skin is thicker than white skin and is less resistant to wrinkling, it requires special treatment because of its tendency to develop excessive scar tissue, Griffin said.And there were other concerns: Nonwhite patients thought that "if they got plastic surgery they would lose their ethnic identity," he said. "But not now. I tell them, 'If anything, you're not trying to look white. If anything, it's the other way around.' "

All Kim Rodriguez wanted was confidence. With a number of bodily flaws and a severe overbite that caused her to cover her mouth whenever she smiled or laughed, Rodriguez, 32, was sinking into depression - until Extreme Makeover picked her during a casting call in North Jersey.

Dorfman gave Rodriguez, no relation to Belen Rodriguez, a glorious smile. Griffin performed breast augmentation (from a size 32A to a 34C), refined the tip of her nose, and liposuctioned her thighs.

"Not to knock other surgeons out there, but Dr. Griffin understands the skin of African American and Hispanic women," says Rodriguez, who is half Puerto Rican and half black. "I felt as though he completely understood me. It was comforting."

The one operation Rodriguez passed on was a butt lift, "but if I need one, I know where to go," she says.

And so, apparently, do many others. The celebrated doctor is now tasting the fruits of stardom.

He attended his first celebrity gala last year, after his first season on the show.

"It was the first time I had walked the red carpet and I saw somebody I had worked on. It was so weird to see her out of context... . I said something like, 'This is great. You get to go to these things all the time because you're in the industry.' She said, 'And now you are, too.'

"I felt like she had knighted me."

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/living/people/women/10206193.htm?1c