Plastic Surgery for your Six-pack

Muscular guys (Credit: celesteh)

Do you want washboard abs? Or, would you like to look like those Baywatch guys, all brawn and six pack? You could join a gym and sweat it out or maybe go in for surgery to get your six pack.

The technique, called abdominal etching, is a kind of precision liposuction. The suction six-pack costs between $4,000 and $7,000 and is only suitable for certain patients, Aldo Benjamin Guerra, the Arizona plastic surgeon who authored the abstract, told us. "I probably turn down about twice as many patients as I work on," he said. "You have to have a certain amount of fat. If you have too little or too much you're not going to get the definition."

The patient needs to have the right amount of fat for this procedure. The magic number, is one to two centimeters of pinchable belly fat. Patients also have to be in good physical shape, and if they've already dropped a lot of weight, they'll probably have too much extra skin for the procedure to work.

Some surgens say that though the technique has been around for more than a decade, but abdominal etching has never really taken off. One reason for this is that it's more popular among men, who tend to be in the minority of cosmetic surgery patients. You'd also have to really, really want flashy abs to go through the whole process.

The procedure takes an hour or two. But pain can persist for days afterward. Swelling can last for weeks or even months. (The after picture was taken a little over a year after the surgery.) And there can be complications, such as infection and bleeding.

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