September 24, 2025 • 12 mins
Should You Really Remove Your Buccal Fat? The Truth Behind the Trend
Buccal fat removal has exploded in popularity on social media—celebrated as a “quick fix” for chiseled cheekbones and a more sculpted look. But is this viral procedure really as safe, effective, and glamorous as it sounds?
In this episode of Plastic Surgery Uncensored, Dr. Rady Rahban breaks down everything you need to know about buccal fat:
🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe, download, and leave a review—it helps more listeners find real, unfiltered conversations about plastic surgery.
✨ If you enjoyed this episode of Plastic Surgery Uncensored:
✔️ Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
✔️ Rate & Review—your feedback helps more people find us.
✔️ Follow Dr. Rady Rahban across all platforms for daily insights, behind-the-scenes, and patient education:
Buccal fat removal has exploded in popularity on social media—celebrated as a “quick fix” for chiseled cheekbones and a more sculpted look. But is this viral procedure really as safe, effective, and glamorous as it sounds?
In this episode of Plastic Surgery Uncensored, Dr. Rady Rahban breaks down everything you need to know about buccal fat:
- What buccal fat actually is and why it matters for facial balance
- The right (and wrong) candidates for this procedure
- Why younger patients are at risk of looking prematurely hollow as they age
- The hidden dangers of overcorrection and nerve damage
- How celebrity trends can mislead patients into unnecessary surgery
🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe, download, and leave a review—it helps more listeners find real, unfiltered conversations about plastic surgery.
✨ If you enjoyed this episode of Plastic Surgery Uncensored:
✔️ Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
✔️ Rate & Review—your feedback helps more people find us.
✔️ Follow Dr. Rady Rahban across all platforms for daily insights, behind-the-scenes, and patient education:
- Instagram: @drradyrahban
- TikTok: @radyrahbanMD
- YouTube: @Rady Rahban
- Facebook: @Rady Rahban
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to another episode of plastic Surgery on Censored. I'm
your host, as always, doctor Roddy Rabon. So today or
this week's episode actually is about buckle fat, buckle fat removal,
and buckle fat. So in plastic surgery, we have big
procedures that do major things, and then we have sort
(00:26):
of these sort of smaller adjunctive procedures that sort of
people don't necessarily know about. Maybe they're not as common,
there may be more subtle, but they are relevant. And
then every once in a while, because of the era
of social media and Internet, things go viral and they
get way more attention or are being done way more
(00:48):
often than they need to be. So I think buckle
fat is one of them. It kind of falls in
the same realm as a liplift. So let me tell
you what the buckle fat is. So in one's in
the cheek area, but not at the high cheek where
the bones are, but right underneath the bones. If you
take your fingers and drop right underneath the bones, you'll
(01:09):
find you get into a little pocket. My face doesn't
have one because or much because I'm quite narrow, and
that is called the buckle space. And in that buckle.
Space is a pocket or a collection in that space
is a pocket or collection of fat. It's kind of
(01:31):
almost the equivalency of an egg yolk. It's very well defined.
It's a very specific type of fat, and it's very finite.
What do I mean, Oh my god, my face is
so fat and so round, I must have a huge
buckle fat. No, could be small. Oh my god, my
face is so skinny and so narrow. I must have
(01:52):
a tiny buckle fat. No, it may be huge, So
it doesn't necessarily correlate. Nevertheless, it is a very finite
amount of fat in its own pocket. Okay, So what
is that of any relevance and what does it matter?
So esthetically, we tend to like faces that are a
little bit more chiseled or a little bit more refined,
(02:14):
and in general, we don't like our faces to be
very chip monkey or very full on the lower half. Yes,
it is beautiful or attractive or desirable for our cheek
bones and the upper cheek and the zygoma and the
arch to look full and strong. But if you think
about how we contour makeup, you kind of put on
blush in the mid section of your face so that
(02:36):
it looks a little hollow or more defined, and that's
actually where you want to be thinner. And in some people,
they're anatomy is that they're just full and they're very cheeky. Okay, so, well, what,
I'm pretty skinny. It's not just because I'm overweight. My
face is just round, which in and of itself isn't
a problem. But if you want a more chisel face,
(02:57):
you're just stuck with it. Well, can I just like
prosuction my face? No, you can't just go round lip
posuction in your face like you can liposuction your love handles,
because there's nerves and arteries and all kinds of really
valuable things. So you're kind of just screwed and stuck. Well,
not exactly. So what you can do is you can
go inside the mouth, right around where your second upper
(03:22):
molar is, second upper molar and in that mucosa of
your buckle space inside your mouth, if you make a
small incision and go straight down through the muscle, you're
gonna go pop and enter the buckle space. And when
you enter the buckle space there will be this yolk
(03:44):
egg yoke type fat that you can tease out and remove.
And what will that do in the right patient, that
will make the middle area of your cheek seem a
little bit hollower, hence a little bit more sculpted, it's
maybe more attractive. So that is what the buckle fat is.
(04:05):
That is why it's a value, and that is how
we go and get it. Okay, who should be doing this?
So first of all, the very very very important is
that not everyone should be doing this. Why because you're
removing something that, while in some instances is not desirable,
in other instances will be desirable or may be desirable.
(04:27):
So one thing is for sure. As we age twenty thirty, thirty, forty,
forty fifty to fifty sixty, we get sagging and we
get hollowing. Sagging we all understood, and we knew facelift hollowing,
we didn't really understand until the last ten to fifteen years.
We actually lose fat. If you look at your grandmother,
she's usually hollow unless she's way way overweight. And if
(04:50):
you look at my son or my daughter, they're nice
and cheeky and fat and fill in the face. So
we do get hollower as we age, and so as
a result, you need to be careful what you remove
when So historically this procedure was very sort of judiciously done.
It wasn't done that often. But today, because procedures go
(05:11):
viral and celebrities start doing them, we have like twenty
two year olds calling our practice wanting to do these
sort of astiric type procedures. So, who is a good
candidate is somebody who is full faced, very cheeky, and
likely to remain full and fat faced as they age
(05:31):
and therefore removing a little bit of that buckle fat
when you're younger isn't going to make any dramatic impact
as they get older. Who shouldn't do this Someone who's
regular faced and wants to have that sort of gaunt
model look. And while if you do it and you're
twenty five and you go from being regular faced to
gaunt and model look and you like it when you
(05:53):
become forty five fifty, maybe way too hollow. So it's
very important. And you can go online google buckle fat
removal and see hundreds, I mean hundreds of celebrities with
terrible outcomes because they were people who were not truly
good candidates. They were people that were regular faced people
they transiently wanted to look a certain way. They remove
(06:16):
their buckle fat, and it made an impact by and large,
it's not a very dramatic transformation. In other words, if
done in the right person. Hi, I'm a young person.
My face is really round and full. I often have
a weak chin associated with it. I wish I had
a little bit more chiseled or angulated. Look. And you
remove that fat. It's gonna be subtle, right, It's not
(06:38):
gonna be like, oh, whoa. It's only when you do
it in someone that shouldn't be doing it and it's
a bad candidate, you're like, whoa, what happened to them?
They didn't remove too much? Okay, Now, how it's done.
It's very simple. It's a one hour procedure. You go
inside the mouth, You numb up the mucosa, that is
the shiny area inside your mouth. You make a small decision,
(06:59):
maybe centimeter centimeter a half, it's really not that much.
You literally go down there's a muscle there. You spread
the muscle and you go pump, and you literally enter
a space called the buckle space, and then you'll immediately
see the fat and the fat just sort of oozes out.
You should remove or a surgeon should remove whatever comes
out easily. You shouldn't be digging and going and trying
(07:22):
to get every square inch of fat. Why, Because you're
now near all the facial nerves, you're around all the
plumbing of the face. You're inside the face proper, and
there's a lot of important anatomy in there. So you
don't want to be going too crazy while you're in there. Okay, great,
So now I've done this thing. What do I expect
in terms of recovery. Actually, the recovery is probably one
(07:44):
of the easiest recoveries in plastic surgery. The incisions are hidden,
they're inside your mouth, they're done with absorbable sutures, and
they're going to absorb. You want to obviously stay away
from really like high viscous foods. You don't want to
be doing this procedure and then me having like a
caramel candy apple, want to be having a ton of
taffioca or things that are sticky. You want to have
what's called low residue food, food that doesn't leave a
(08:07):
bunch of residue behind you just want to eat your food,
wash your mouth with some water. At least for the
first seven to ten days. There's relatively little bit of swelling,
because remember, you swell, but then you remove the fat,
so to be honest with you should kind of look
like nothing ever happened. And then you can expect that
over the course of the next two to three months
(08:29):
that area will vary gradually and incrementally go in a
little bit and create it perhaps a little bit of
a more hollowed or model type. Look. Now, I would
say that the overwhelming majority of people will not notice
what you're talking about. Again, if you're the right candidate,
you will, but most people won't. Other than that, there's
really not much to the recovery. It's of quite a
(08:50):
simple recovery. So naturally no procedures without its risks, and
buckle fat is no different. So let's talk about the
risks other than bleeding and infection. In all those things, obviously,
there's essentially no scar, right because it's inside your mouth.
The one that we worry about most is nerve damage. Right,
if somebody goes in that space and doesn't just allow
(09:10):
the fat to passively come out, and starts really going
in there and starts looking for it, they're going to
obviously cause nerve damage that can be transient or worse,
that can be permanent, so that's very avoidable. Two, you
can get asymmetry, like what if you inherently have more
fat on one side than the other, or the surgeon
removes way more on one side than the other. That's
(09:31):
not ideal. You want to remove essentially the same amount
out of both sides, or if one side is worse
than the other, take that into consideration. And lastly, and
by far, probably the thing that's most concerning about buckle
fat and probably what has brought it to the attention
of the general public is over correction. Like everything else,
(09:52):
I did a whole episode on lip lifts. When people
hear of a procedure that's quick, easy, affordable, why is
it affordable? It's not that big a surgery, Then all
of a sudden, everyone's running out to do it right
because who the hell doesn't want to look like a model?
And next thing you know, it's overdone and you're having
all these bad outcomes. This never was the issue twenty
(10:13):
years ago because it wasn't popular twenty years ago, because
it was only done in people that were appropriate. So
overcorrection is the main issue, which is I go in there,
I don't really need it. My surgeon is unscrupulous, doesn't
tell me I'm a bad candidate remove the fat. I
don't know. A year or two years later, all of
a sudden, I have a holowist that doesn't look natural
or desirable. Now I'm dealing with filler and fat transfer
(10:35):
and all this other crap. And it was affordable from
the very beginning. So I hope that, in general, is
very helpful regarding the procedure. It can be done under
general or conscious sedation. I don't really recommend to doing
under local, even if your surgeon says they can do it,
and I think it's a really useful adjunct in the
(10:58):
right patient population. So if you're contemplating it, I hope
this helps you. Just be careful and make sure you
do your homework. All right, guys, that's an easy quick rap.
That was a quick episode. So I've been told that
instead of asking you to share, I'm supposed to ask
you to download and subscribe to our podcast. Right, We
(11:19):
want you, guys to enjoy our episodes, and moreover, we
want more people to be able to enjoy them. And
the more you download and the more you subscribe, the
better our podcast does, and lastly, go write something nice.
It really helps us. It makes everybody enjoy the podcast experience.
We have a lot of people putting in times behind
(11:40):
the scenes, and usually you're like, I'm gonna go write
something and then all of a sudden you're kids screaming
and then you gotta run out of the door. Fuck,
I just forgot to write something. So literally, if you
can go click end of the episode, go write something nice,
we would be grateful, grateful, grateful. All right, guys, that's
a rap. This is yet another episode of Plastic Surgery
and censored and as always, I will see you next week.
(12:00):
Your host, doctor Roddy Raban,
Welcome to another episode of plastic Surgery on Censored. I'm
your host, as always, doctor Roddy Rabon. So today or
this week's episode actually is about buckle fat, buckle fat removal,
and buckle fat. So in plastic surgery, we have big
procedures that do major things, and then we have sort
(00:26):
of these sort of smaller adjunctive procedures that sort of
people don't necessarily know about. Maybe they're not as common,
there may be more subtle, but they are relevant. And
then every once in a while, because of the era
of social media and Internet, things go viral and they
get way more attention or are being done way more
(00:48):
often than they need to be. So I think buckle
fat is one of them. It kind of falls in
the same realm as a liplift. So let me tell
you what the buckle fat is. So in one's in
the cheek area, but not at the high cheek where
the bones are, but right underneath the bones. If you
take your fingers and drop right underneath the bones, you'll
(01:09):
find you get into a little pocket. My face doesn't
have one because or much because I'm quite narrow, and
that is called the buckle space. And in that buckle.
Space is a pocket or a collection in that space
is a pocket or collection of fat. It's kind of
(01:31):
almost the equivalency of an egg yolk. It's very well defined.
It's a very specific type of fat, and it's very finite.
What do I mean, Oh my god, my face is
so fat and so round, I must have a huge
buckle fat. No, could be small. Oh my god, my
face is so skinny and so narrow. I must have
(01:52):
a tiny buckle fat. No, it may be huge, So
it doesn't necessarily correlate. Nevertheless, it is a very finite
amount of fat in its own pocket. Okay, So what
is that of any relevance and what does it matter?
So esthetically, we tend to like faces that are a
little bit more chiseled or a little bit more refined,
(02:14):
and in general, we don't like our faces to be
very chip monkey or very full on the lower half. Yes,
it is beautiful or attractive or desirable for our cheek
bones and the upper cheek and the zygoma and the
arch to look full and strong. But if you think
about how we contour makeup, you kind of put on
blush in the mid section of your face so that
(02:36):
it looks a little hollow or more defined, and that's
actually where you want to be thinner. And in some people,
they're anatomy is that they're just full and they're very cheeky. Okay, so, well, what,
I'm pretty skinny. It's not just because I'm overweight. My
face is just round, which in and of itself isn't
a problem. But if you want a more chisel face,
(02:57):
you're just stuck with it. Well, can I just like
prosuction my face? No, you can't just go round lip
posuction in your face like you can liposuction your love handles,
because there's nerves and arteries and all kinds of really
valuable things. So you're kind of just screwed and stuck. Well,
not exactly. So what you can do is you can
go inside the mouth, right around where your second upper
(03:22):
molar is, second upper molar and in that mucosa of
your buckle space inside your mouth, if you make a
small incision and go straight down through the muscle, you're
gonna go pop and enter the buckle space. And when
you enter the buckle space there will be this yolk
(03:44):
egg yoke type fat that you can tease out and remove.
And what will that do in the right patient, that
will make the middle area of your cheek seem a
little bit hollower, hence a little bit more sculpted, it's
maybe more attractive. So that is what the buckle fat is.
(04:05):
That is why it's a value, and that is how
we go and get it. Okay, who should be doing this?
So first of all, the very very very important is
that not everyone should be doing this. Why because you're
removing something that, while in some instances is not desirable,
in other instances will be desirable or may be desirable.
(04:27):
So one thing is for sure. As we age twenty thirty, thirty, forty,
forty fifty to fifty sixty, we get sagging and we
get hollowing. Sagging we all understood, and we knew facelift hollowing,
we didn't really understand until the last ten to fifteen years.
We actually lose fat. If you look at your grandmother,
she's usually hollow unless she's way way overweight. And if
(04:50):
you look at my son or my daughter, they're nice
and cheeky and fat and fill in the face. So
we do get hollower as we age, and so as
a result, you need to be careful what you remove
when So historically this procedure was very sort of judiciously done.
It wasn't done that often. But today, because procedures go
(05:11):
viral and celebrities start doing them, we have like twenty
two year olds calling our practice wanting to do these
sort of astiric type procedures. So, who is a good
candidate is somebody who is full faced, very cheeky, and
likely to remain full and fat faced as they age
(05:31):
and therefore removing a little bit of that buckle fat
when you're younger isn't going to make any dramatic impact
as they get older. Who shouldn't do this Someone who's
regular faced and wants to have that sort of gaunt
model look. And while if you do it and you're
twenty five and you go from being regular faced to
gaunt and model look and you like it when you
(05:53):
become forty five fifty, maybe way too hollow. So it's
very important. And you can go online google buckle fat
removal and see hundreds, I mean hundreds of celebrities with
terrible outcomes because they were people who were not truly
good candidates. They were people that were regular faced people
they transiently wanted to look a certain way. They remove
(06:16):
their buckle fat, and it made an impact by and large,
it's not a very dramatic transformation. In other words, if
done in the right person. Hi, I'm a young person.
My face is really round and full. I often have
a weak chin associated with it. I wish I had
a little bit more chiseled or angulated. Look. And you
remove that fat. It's gonna be subtle, right, It's not
(06:38):
gonna be like, oh, whoa. It's only when you do
it in someone that shouldn't be doing it and it's
a bad candidate, you're like, whoa, what happened to them?
They didn't remove too much? Okay, Now, how it's done.
It's very simple. It's a one hour procedure. You go
inside the mouth, You numb up the mucosa, that is
the shiny area inside your mouth. You make a small decision,
(06:59):
maybe centimeter centimeter a half, it's really not that much.
You literally go down there's a muscle there. You spread
the muscle and you go pump, and you literally enter
a space called the buckle space, and then you'll immediately
see the fat and the fat just sort of oozes out.
You should remove or a surgeon should remove whatever comes
out easily. You shouldn't be digging and going and trying
(07:22):
to get every square inch of fat. Why, Because you're
now near all the facial nerves, you're around all the
plumbing of the face. You're inside the face proper, and
there's a lot of important anatomy in there. So you
don't want to be going too crazy while you're in there. Okay, great,
So now I've done this thing. What do I expect
in terms of recovery. Actually, the recovery is probably one
(07:44):
of the easiest recoveries in plastic surgery. The incisions are hidden,
they're inside your mouth, they're done with absorbable sutures, and
they're going to absorb. You want to obviously stay away
from really like high viscous foods. You don't want to
be doing this procedure and then me having like a
caramel candy apple, want to be having a ton of
taffioca or things that are sticky. You want to have
what's called low residue food, food that doesn't leave a
(08:07):
bunch of residue behind you just want to eat your food,
wash your mouth with some water. At least for the
first seven to ten days. There's relatively little bit of swelling,
because remember, you swell, but then you remove the fat,
so to be honest with you should kind of look
like nothing ever happened. And then you can expect that
over the course of the next two to three months
(08:29):
that area will vary gradually and incrementally go in a
little bit and create it perhaps a little bit of
a more hollowed or model type. Look. Now, I would
say that the overwhelming majority of people will not notice
what you're talking about. Again, if you're the right candidate,
you will, but most people won't. Other than that, there's
really not much to the recovery. It's of quite a
(08:50):
simple recovery. So naturally no procedures without its risks, and
buckle fat is no different. So let's talk about the
risks other than bleeding and infection. In all those things, obviously,
there's essentially no scar, right because it's inside your mouth.
The one that we worry about most is nerve damage. Right,
if somebody goes in that space and doesn't just allow
(09:10):
the fat to passively come out, and starts really going
in there and starts looking for it, they're going to
obviously cause nerve damage that can be transient or worse,
that can be permanent, so that's very avoidable. Two, you
can get asymmetry, like what if you inherently have more
fat on one side than the other, or the surgeon
removes way more on one side than the other. That's
(09:31):
not ideal. You want to remove essentially the same amount
out of both sides, or if one side is worse
than the other, take that into consideration. And lastly, and
by far, probably the thing that's most concerning about buckle
fat and probably what has brought it to the attention
of the general public is over correction. Like everything else,
(09:52):
I did a whole episode on lip lifts. When people
hear of a procedure that's quick, easy, affordable, why is
it affordable? It's not that big a surgery, Then all
of a sudden, everyone's running out to do it right
because who the hell doesn't want to look like a model?
And next thing you know, it's overdone and you're having
all these bad outcomes. This never was the issue twenty
(10:13):
years ago because it wasn't popular twenty years ago, because
it was only done in people that were appropriate. So
overcorrection is the main issue, which is I go in there,
I don't really need it. My surgeon is unscrupulous, doesn't
tell me I'm a bad candidate remove the fat. I
don't know. A year or two years later, all of
a sudden, I have a holowist that doesn't look natural
or desirable. Now I'm dealing with filler and fat transfer
(10:35):
and all this other crap. And it was affordable from
the very beginning. So I hope that, in general, is
very helpful regarding the procedure. It can be done under
general or conscious sedation. I don't really recommend to doing
under local, even if your surgeon says they can do it,
and I think it's a really useful adjunct in the
(10:58):
right patient population. So if you're contemplating it, I hope
this helps you. Just be careful and make sure you
do your homework. All right, guys, that's an easy quick rap.
That was a quick episode. So I've been told that
instead of asking you to share, I'm supposed to ask
you to download and subscribe to our podcast. Right, We
(11:19):
want you, guys to enjoy our episodes, and moreover, we
want more people to be able to enjoy them. And
the more you download and the more you subscribe, the
better our podcast does, and lastly, go write something nice.
It really helps us. It makes everybody enjoy the podcast experience.
We have a lot of people putting in times behind
(11:40):
the scenes, and usually you're like, I'm gonna go write
something and then all of a sudden you're kids screaming
and then you gotta run out of the door. Fuck,
I just forgot to write something. So literally, if you
can go click end of the episode, go write something nice,
we would be grateful, grateful, grateful. All right, guys, that's
a rap. This is yet another episode of Plastic Surgery
and censored and as always, I will see you next week.
(12:00):
Your host, doctor Roddy Raban,
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