San Antonio, TX | Picking an Implant Size | San Antonio Plastic Surgery Institute

Hi, I'm Dr. Michael Decherd, a board certified plastic surgeon. I practice in San Antonio, Texas. I'd like to talk to you now about breast augmentation. I'd like to talk to you about how I pick an implant size. There's a lot of confusion about what size a woman wants to go with. They talk about cup sizes and that's helpful, but it's not that helpful because it's an imprecise system. Here's the way I approach it. I want to match the width of the implant to the width of the woman's breast. Once you have the right width, everything looks better. You've seen somebody who looks like they have tennis balls probably. Part of the problem is they're not wide enough so if there's a big gap here, then maybe they didn't get a wide enough implant.

Once we have your width, then we also give you the following choices. You can have a low, medium or high profile implant. That changes the shape of the upper pole and affects how much volume there is. If you have a wide woman, you need an implant that's going to sound bigger. In other words, this implant requires less volume than this implant to give different women a similar look. In my office, we'll try on some implants in a bra. We have a simulator that does a 3D simulation on a TV screen for you, it's called the Vectra. That's how we approach picking the size for breast augmentation. If I can answer any questions, please let me know.