What Is the Difference Between Breast Reduction and Breast Lift Surgery?

Many people probably have a vague understanding that reduction and lift are different.

As you might guess, the surgery that makes a large breast smaller is called reduction surgery, and the surgery that lifts a breast that is not particularly large but has sagged is called lift surgery.

However, if you think about it a little more deeply, the situation is not that simple.

When the breasts are large, sagging naturally follows, so reduction surgery and lift surgery are often performed together.

On the other hand, even when you think, “It’s just sagging,” the underlying cause is actually that the breasts sag because they have a certain amount of weight.

If the breasts were truly small, sagging would not occur.

In the end, even when it seems like there is only sagging, some tissue still has to be removed, so at first glance reduction surgery and lift surgery may not seem very different.

However, once you hear a more detailed explanation, the difference becomes clear.

In fact, lift surgery is not a procedure that pulls up the entire breast as if lifting it with your hands; rather, it is a surgery that restores the sagging nipple and areola to their normal position.

Sometimes, based on the idea of lifting only the nipple and areola, the surgeon may simply cut out a round area around the areola and move the sagging nipple upward.

In such cases, the position of the nipple will be raised, but the stretched shape below the nipple does not improve.

In the end, when surgery is done this way, the overall breast shape becomes flat and less full.

And the lower part still looks stretched, causing the breast’s characteristic rounded three-dimensional shape to disappear.

Therefore, when operating on sagging breasts, you need to pay attention to the following:

• Raising the position of the nipple
• Removing stretched lower breast tissue
• Bringing both sides of the tissue together to reduce width

Only by paying attention to these points can a beautiful, rounded shape be created.

When surgery is performed in this way, both breast reduction and breast lift are designed to have an overall similar shape, with only a slight difference in size, so you may wonder, “Aren’t the two surgeries the same?”

So then, what exactly is the fundamental difference between reduction surgery and lift surgery?

The biggest difference between the two can be said to depend on how the stretched lower breast tissue is handled.

Reduction surgery removes as much of the stretched lower tissue as possible, while lift surgery does not remove the sagging lower tissue but moves it upward to fill the upper volume.

Do you understand the difference between reduction surgery and lift surgery a little better now?

Both surgeries have in common that they raise the nipple to an ideal position,

Reduction: removing and eliminating breast tissue

Lift: not discarding the tissue, but moving it

That would be a good summary.

Please keep this in mind so that you can understand more clearly whether the surgery you want is reduction or lift.