Newport Beach board-certified plastic surgeon Dr. Jae Chun took to Instagram on Friday, July 24, to call out the contrast between the “marketing propaganda” and reality of cohesive gel, form-stable, silicone Gummy Bear breast implants.
One image, evidently used in marketing, shows a manicured hand with glossy red fingernails holding a cohesive gel breast implant that has been torn in half.
Its inside edges are jagged but the implant is otherwise intact.
No gel is leaking from either side and the implant is transparent.
“Myth (marketing propaganda) vs. Reality,” writes Dr. Chun. “These pictures of high[ly] cohesive gel (gummy) implants cut in half showing nothing leaking out are everywhere.”
Surgical Times was unable to discover the creator of that particular image, but a reverse image search in Google revealed that it appears on more than 100 websites, most of them for breast augmentation providers outside of the United States.
This Arizona surgeon’s website shows the pristine image in question along with a video of a MemoryGel® implant by Mentor being cut in half.
Introductory text on the surgeon’s website says, “The ‘gummy bear’ implant is filled with a silicone gel, a material not absorbed by the body if the implant ruptures.
“Since they have the same consistency of gummy bear candies, there is no inner gel to leak out.”
A similar video appears on Mentor’s website for its MemoryGel® implants.
The video has no audio but the message seems to be what the Arizona surgeon above has put in print.
But Dr. Jae Chun shares a different story.
Not mentioning any specific manufacturer of cohesive gel breast implants in this particular post, Dr. Chun says, “These [images] are used to promote a false narrative that says these implants will not leak when broken. BUT these pictures show brand new implants!
“After being placed inside [the] human body and subjected to body temperature and mechanical stresses of everyday activities, they behave very differently.”
What began as a perfectly round and fully transparent breast implant is, after seven years, now an opaque multicolored lump with poorly defined edges and something oozing out from beneath it.
“I have pictures of so many of these less than 10 years old and badly broken and leaking ‘gummy’ implants on my FB and Instagram pages.”
“Time for truth in advertising,” says Dr. Chun.