Tougher still when you’re living in a city like Los Angeles where everybody is gorgeous. Or, as model and makeup artist Juliana Hussins puts it, "You walk into a mall and everybody looks like they’ve come from a pictorial. It’s tough for women, and the men as well – they work out like crazy. LA’s idea of beauty is different from the rest of the world’s. There, to be beautiful is to be perfect."
Beauty is what brought 28-year-old Juliana to the Philippines, or more specifically, to Dr. Vicki Belo. She had attended one of Vicki’s seminars in the US, researched about her practice, and saw how a Filipino friend of hers had transformed himself from a depressed 52-year-old into a 35-year-old-looking guy whose life changed dramatically after undergoing Aptos Thread and liposuction procedures in Vicki’s clinic.
"When he came back, he changed his lifestyle as well," Juliana says. "They counseled him about changing a lot of things. When I saw him after a few months, he was like a completely different person and I said, Okay, I need to go there."
It sounds a little strange for an LA-based model who’s married to one of Guess?’s top honchos, John Landis – who’s director of design for men at Guess? – to travel all the way to Asia when there are so many clinics offering the same services in LA.
"The business there is just booming," says Juliana. "When I attend parties, I know who has had something done. I see all these gorgeous women, they’re very open about it. But being Asian (her father is Malaysian, her mother Scottish), I don’t want people there to know what I’m doing. It’s a cultural thing, I guess," she says with a laugh. "There’s a clinic opening in LA every five minutes. But the thing is, the people there don’t get properly trained. I hear a lot of horror stories about cosmetic surgery and there are doctors who studied medicine and then they do six months in dermatology and call themselves dermatologists. They’re ruining people’s skin, they’re giving them all these treatments, but they don’t know what they’re doing. I wanted someone who’s been in the business for a long time. "
Vicki herself knows the pressures LA exacts on women. She is often in LA as an invited guest speaker at cosmetic surgery seminars. Juliana met Vicki Belo when she was modeling for a show that her friend was organizing. Vicki was there promoting medical tourism in the Philippines. "At first, I couldn’t believe they were doing these procedures here. I pulled her doctor’s portfolio, saw the before-and-after pictures of her patients, and they all looked so natural."
That was the key to her finally deciding to get these procedures done. As any woman will tell you, it’s hard enough to decide on a pair of jeans, what more on cosmetic surgery? Should you or shouldn’t you? And how far will you go? So in late January, Juliana flew to the Philippines to have breast augmentation and liposuction and she’s very happy about the results, primarily because what she has now is simply a better version of herself – not different, just better – the Juliana before she gave birth to her daughter two years ago (she gained 60 lbs. when she was pregnant and lost it four months later through spinning).
For her, bigger is not necessarily better. From a cup C, Juliana is still a cup C, just a tad larger. "I did the smallest, most natural augmentation I could do. That was the first thing I said: I don’t want to look like Pam Anderson! People are not going to look and say, "Yeah, she did something." In the US, doctors don’t listen to you. They will make your breasts big because they think you’re going to come back and ask them to do them bigger. I’ve had several friends who have done breast augmentation twice because they wanted to go smaller."
Vicki explains, "When you give birth, your breasts sort of shrink instead of get bigger. We just went back to the size of her natural breasts before she breastfed for a year. They don’t do silicone breast implants in the States; they do saline, which makes breasts look like two hard tennis balls. In Europe, they use silicone, which is more natural-looking. There’s a lot of politics involved in plastic surgery between what’s invented in Europe and what’s invented in the United States!"
Vicki describes Juliana as the perfect candidate for liposuction and breast augmentation; For one, she is not overweight; rather, she keeps an active lifestyle, working out four to five times a week; she maintains a balanced, healthy diet; and she was psychologically prepared to do it. When she told her husband about it, his reaction was: "You don’t need to do it. I like you the way you are."
Juliana’s answer: "I wanted to do it for me, not for anybody else. I know how I used to look and I wanted to have that again. He got it and became very supportive. No, he wasn’t surprised I was going to the Philippines for it, he trusted my instincts. I have a lot of Filipino friends and I knew Vicki was the best, but I didn’t know how amazing she is here. I asked around, checked online, attended her beauty shows, saw how popular she is and knew she was doing something right."
Looking at Juliana, you’d think this girl is perfect as she is. But blame it on genetics, no matter how much she worked out, she had problem areas – the bane of most women – her thighs and knees.
"In my family, we all have pretty okay bodies, but our legs, no matter what we do…My mom has perfect calves, no stretch marks even after four kids, but the legs!"
Vicki adds, "She works out a lot, but the fat wouldn’t move. There’s fat and then there’s muscle, those are two different things. When you work out, it’s really the muscles that get firm , the fat doesn’t turn into muscle. Also, when you’re genetically predisposed, like if your mom has big thighs, the fat normally goes there. With Filipinos it’s always the puson; with Caucasians and other nationalities, it’s the hips and thighs, but they have flat stomachs."
With Juliana, Vicki did Smartliposuction before the breast augmentation. "She has a lean body but an abnormal distribution of fat, too much around her knees. When I do knees, I normally do just the inner part but with her, I also did the outer part and the knee itself. We also did lipo on her inner and outer thighs."
According to Vicki, Smartlipo is the next big thing in cosmetic surgery, the best fat-melting procedure for people who don’t want to undergo surgery. It’s no secret that Vicki tries the procedures her clinics offer on herself before offering them to the public. "I try to get the latest technology from abroad, which entails nonstop traveling. That’s my obsession. I attend seminars and conventions where doctors present their new findings and technologies. I get to see exciting new procedures, visit the doctors in their clinics and see them at work."
Vicki got the Smartlipo from Italy. It’s a brand name for the machine used for laser lipolysis. Vicki explains that as the laser goes inside the body, it makes the fat burst, which the patient can either opt to have sucked out by regular liposuction or – as some patients opt to even though it takes much longer to see the results – leave it in the body for natural disposal.
"In Italy, as in a lot of places, doctors use Smartlipo as a fat-melting procedure. It uses a fiber- optic tube and enters the body through a small puncture. You move it to the fatty areas and where there’s fat, there’s resistance, and as you move the tube around, the resistance lessens, the fat bursts. When you don’t feel resistance anymore, the fat is now outside the fat cells, and your body can get rid of it. It passes through the lymphatic drainage naturally but that takes time. If you leave it in the body, the patient wears a girdle and in four months, you will see the final results and you assess if you need to do another session. For us liposuction surgeons, we use Smartlipo to improve the results of liposuction because when the fat’s already melted, it’s much easier to suck it out. You don’t do the plunging anymore. It comes out like soup. The laser makes the skin contract, so you have much better results. With regular lipo, sometimes the skin is kind of wavy which means it didn’t contract well. If you do Smartlipo, it will contract, and you have less swelling and bruising – and the thighs are notorious for bruising and swelling."
Juliana interjects with a laugh, "You have to sit slowly like an old woman after you’ve had it done. It’s more uncomfortable than painful, really. It’s like muscle soreness after you’ve done cycling for three hours."
Three years ago, the Belo group brought in mesotherapy from France, which uses chemicals injected into the fat. Vicki says mesotherapy brings mixed results. Some people’s fat cells burst, others don’t. "It depends on how thick the fat capsules are. It works beautifully for some people, while for others you have to do numerous sessions. Smartlipo removes that unpredictability. There is no patient that will not respond well to it. This is the replacement for meso – a much better one – for people who don’t want a surgical procedure."