People are getting BBLs and breast implants from donated cadavers: ‘It’s off-the-shelf-fat’

Talk about a killer body.

Across the country, a growing number of patients are turning to injectable fillers made from the dearly departed’s donated fat in order to lift, plump and sculpt their bodies — including for hot-ticket procedures like Brazilian butt lifts (BBL) and breast enhancements.

“Many of us in New York City are very excited about this, particularly because our patients are sometimes very thin or maybe have already had liposuction,” Dr. Melissa Doft, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Manhattan, said in an Instagram video. “It’s off-the-shelf-fat.”

The filler, called AlloClae, hit the US market last year — but it still isn’t widely available.

“I’d say less than probably 5% of board certified plastic surgeons have it,” Dr. Sachin M. Shridharani, who began offering the procedure at his Manhattan clinic, Luxurgery, in early 2025 as part of a small clinical trial measuring its outcomes in fixing “hip dips,” told The Post.

“With the ones that do have it across the country, there’s tremendous amount of demand,” he added, noting he’s done more than 50 procedures in the past year. “There have been multiple times that we’ve actually run out of product.”

AlloClae is made from sterile fat harvested from cadavers and can be administered through minimally invasive, in-office injections by a qualified provider, without the need for general anesthesia.

Before it’s injected, the donor fat undergoes a multi-step cleansing, sterilization and purification process that removes cellular debris, DNA and other elements that could trigger a negative immune response in the body.

“We ensure all our tissue is consented to for aesthetic use,” Caro Van Hove, president of Tiger Aesthetics, the company behind AlloClae, said in an interview with The Cut, meaning the people giving their bodies didn’t think they were donating them to medical or scientific discovery.

“The donor material is meticulously screened in accordance with regulated and high-quality tissue practices,” Van Hove added.

The process preserves the tissue’s key structural elements, resulting in a bioactive filler designed to add long-lasting volume and structure anywhere fat naturally exists in the body.

“It actually helps the patient’s own collagen to grow in as well,” Dr. Stephen T. Greenberg, a New York plastic surgeon, said in a YouTube video while performing the procedure.

“This is great for somebody who doesn’t want to use their own fat or doesn’t have enough of their own fat in order to do a Brazilian butt lift or a buttock augmentation,” he continued.

At Shridharani’s practice, demand has been especially strong for AlloClae injections in the buttocks, breasts and hips.

“We are also getting a lot of patients coming to us that have had, unfortunately, poorly done liposuction with tons of contour regularities that need fat grafting back in because of grooves, contour irregularities over-resection,” he noted.

While the idea of using cadaver donor fat can initially make some patients uneasy, Shridharani said those concerns tend to fade after a thorough discussion of the product.

“I think transparency is key,” he said. “It’s tissue that’s been gifted in kind, and it’s no different from situations where a patient needs additional cartilage but doesn’t want to undergo a rib graft and the scarring that comes with harvesting their own tissue — in those cases, we use cadaver cartilage grafts.”

“I think that pretty much alleviates most people’s concerns.”

Shridharani said the procedures typically start at $10,000, with costs increase depending on the scope of treatment.

“If you want a full breast augmentation, hip dip and some buttock treatment and you have to use hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cc’s of AlloClae, well, that’s going to cost tens of thousands of dollars,” he said.

From a regulatory standpoint, AlloClae occupies a distinct category. While it is FDA-compliant, it is classified as a human cell and tissue product, allowing it to be sold without full agency approval — unlike traditional injectables such as Botox.

Early evidence suggests the injections are safe and effective. Because AlloClae is made from processed human fat, doctors say it’s highly biocompatible.

“The enhancement is so absolutely natural, it looks like my body with the impact of time erased,” a 61-year-old woman who used AlloClae in a recent BBL, told The Cut. “Plus, it’s not just that the area that looks fuller, but my skin looks tauter and is no longer crepey.”

Women aren’t the only ones jumping on board. Men are turning to the next-generation filler too, sculpting their pectorals without implants or surgery, among other uses.

“[It] creates an insta-chest where you do not need general anesthesia, you do not need to have a long post-op, you can do it and virtually go back to the office, just like you would do with filler in the face,” Dr. Douglas S. Steinbrech, a plastic surgeon specializing in male aesthetics, said in a TikTok.

AlloClae is also being touted as a way to restore volume lost from popular weight loss drugs.

“All of that weight loss and sagging areas from your GLP-1 like Mounjaro, tirzepatide, Zepbound, any of those types of treatments. Guess what? We can use some AlloClae to give you that hip dip, buttocks and breast contour back,” Shridharani said in a TikTok. “This is going to be pretty impressive and groundbreaking.”

Still, it’s not risk-free. Possible side effects include temporary swelling, bruising, bleeding and pain at the injection site, along with rare issues like small lumps, asymmetry, oil cysts, infections and allergic reactions.

“A lot of people are coming out of the woodwork wanting to not get left behind with using AlloClae, but they aren’t necessarily clinicians that know how to perform a surgical fat graft correctly on the body or on the breast,” Shridharani said.

“This is surgery at the end of the day,” he continued. “The most important thing to me is making sure that the provider has experience with surgical fat grafting.”