Brachioplasty also known as Surgical Arm Reduction

Mr. Adrian Richards describes the Brachioplasty or Arm Lift procedure, operation that tightens and removes excess skin in the arm area, and the different existing types of Brachioplasty techniques, what they involve, advantages and disadvantages, scarring, and downtime.

Brachioplasty Also Known As Surgical Arm Reduction

Hello. My name is Adrian Richards. I’m a plastic surgeon and the Surgical Director of Aurora Clinics based here in the United Kingdom. In this video, I’m going to be talking about a brachioplasty, which is an operation to tighten and remove excess skin in the arm area. The brachio bit of the brachioplasty just means arm. So brachio is the medical term for an arm. Plasty means remodelling.

Now, I’ve talked in previous videos about liposuction, which is a very good option for people whose main problem is excess tissue under the skin of the arms, fatty tissue, rather than excess skin. There are different types depending on where the excess skin is. Working up from the most basic type to slightly more extensive types, if you’ve got just a little bit of excess skin, you can just have a transverse area of skin removed from your underarm area, just transversely in the natural skin crease. What that does is it removes an area of skin and it lifts the skin of your arm upwards, rather like pulling up a stocking or pulling up a sock in the area. That’s then stitched and that tightens the area up. So that’s suitable really for your excess skin and it’s just in the upper part and it’s really good because the scar will be concealed in your armpit areas. That’s really for people with excess skin in the upper part of the arm where there’s not too much excess skin.

Moving on, if you have got more excess skin, particularly extending down to the middle part of the arm and towards the elbow you’re going to need a full brachioplasty procedure. You do have that transverse excision in the armpit that I was talking about, but also you have an excision down the arm because just lifting the skin up like a stocking, as I mentioned, leaves excess skin here. If you lift that area up and you’ve still got loose skin here, you’re going to need an excision down the arm. What that does then is actually physically tightens up this skin here and removes it. Often, as I’ve mentioned, this technique can be combined with liposuction.

The advantages with a full brachioplasty is that it’s going to remove the excess skin from the area which is great. You’re probably going to get more removal of skin, so your arm is going to be thinner and look better afterwards. But the downside is you’re going to have a scar along the inside of your arm. Most surgeons, I know I certainly do, try and keep the scar absolutely on the side of the arm, so when you’ve got your arm onto your body here, you can’t see it. If you did wear a dress or some sort of clothing that showed your arms, if you’ve got your arms down, you won’t be able to see the scar from behind or in front. However, if you do lift your arm, people will see that scar. The scar does normally fade really well into a pale silvery line over the months and years following surgery. But it’s important to realise that with any scars they’re always going to be there essentially. Although they improve with time, they will probably always be visible to some extent.

If you did want to send us an e-mail picture of the area of concern, please do so and we’ll be happy to give you an opinion as to the best type of arm lift reduction for you. Thanks very much for watching the video. I hope you’ll be able to watch more in our series, perhaps listen to our podcasts, video, our before and after gallery and have a good look through the website.