By Joshua Scurlock, MD — FusionMD Cosmetic Surgery, Miami, Florida
Full disclosure: writing a blog post is really not my idea of a good time. However, according to my social media team, neither is recording marketing content. The website crew would say that neither is updating my photo gallery. And according to the majority of patients I’ve seen in the last few months — “Why don’t you share all of these photos?!”
So, like the true Millennial baby that I am, I’ve taken the feedback and decided to write an essay about it. Here’s the actual confession: all I want to do is operate and talk to patients about cosmetic surgery. The marketing, the “website-ing,” and the TikTok dancing have never really brought me any joy… and, I dance like a white boy. Thank God for my patients, because once word-of-mouth advertising kept me busy enough, I pulled waaaaaaay back on everything else.
This culmination of events was likely compounded by years of wrestling with imposter syndrome. But in the last few months, I’ve started admitting something to myself: I’m pretty damn good at this. That doesn’t mean I can promise you results, no ethical surgeon can ever do that. What I can promise you is, I truly believe I’m one of the best doing it right now and I have no intention on slowing down.
With that in mind, I did sit down to put my thoughts on paper about the procedure I do almost every day of the week. Let me start with the most counterintuitive one.
That’s not a marketing line. It’s just true.
When you come into my office, I’m not trying to upsell you into something bigger than you need. I’ll lay out the pros and cons of every reasonable way to address what’s bothering you. I’ll tell you what I’d do if I were operating on my spouse. And then I’ll tell you this: that still doesn’t make it the right decision for you until I understand what you actually want to achieve.
Depending on the goal, some patients need a traditional tummy tuck. Some just need liposuction. Some are better off waiting, working towards their healthy, maintainable, goal weight or doing nothing at all. My job in a consultation is to figure out which of those you are, not to convince you that you’re the one who needs the biggest operation on the menu.
Okay, with that out of the way, let’s talk about when the Curvy Tuck actually is the right answer.
A traditional abdominoplasty is a great operation. It removes the excess skin below the belly button, repairs the abdominal muscles that pregnancy and weight changes have separated, and leaves you with a flat, firm front. It really resets the anatomical changes of pregnancy that can effect many different aspects of life. If a flat front is the whole problem, a tummy tuck is the whole solution.
But here’s what I see in consultations almost every day. A patient lifts her shirt and says some version of this: “I want my stomach flat, but I don’t to look like a box, I want to still look like me.”
A standalone tummy tuck cannot do that. A tummy tuck works on the front and leaves the back looking untouched. The silhouette, the part of you that other people actually see when you’re in that tight form fitting dress, is a 360-degree problem.
That’s the line I use with patients, and I mean it. The Curvy Tuck is equal parts sculpting and tailoring, and I’m genuinely proud of both halves of that job.
The sculpting part is what you like without even knowing you like it: shaping fat, contouring the waist, defining the transition from the waits to hip to thigh and lower back to glutes.
The tailoring part is the half most surgeons undersell. It’s also where the Curvy Tuck earns its name.
Think about a pair of pants that are loose all the way around. A good tailor is not going to just take in the front and leave the sides and back baggy. That is not tailoring. That’s a mess. The pants would pucker, the fabric would bunch, and no amount of clever draping would hide it.
Skin and soft tissue work exactly the same way. After pregnancy, significant weight changes, or just the passage of time, the excess skin and fat don’t politely stay on the front of your abdomen. They wrap around. They settle at the flanks. They change the shape of your lateral hip and the way it transitions into your glutes. If I only tailor the front, even a beautiful tummy tuck, the rest of the 360-degree silhouette is still loose, and you’re stuck trying to hide it with compression garments and good lighting angles. I just want it to look good from every angle, naked.
A real tailor alters the whole garment so it hangs right. A real body contouring operation does exactly the same thing.
The Curvy Tuck is my signature procedure. It’s a specific combination I’ve refined over the past two years across my first 500 cases since fully adopting this methodology towards body contouring. It is not a marketing name for a tummy tuck with extra steps. It’s a specific operation designed to address the entire silhouette under one anesthetic, with one recovery.
In its most common form, it combines three things:
The goal isn’t a bigger butt. The goal is a silhouette that reads as yours, just cleaner, tighter, more proportional and youthful — from every angle.
And if you want proof that the human eye has been rewarding this particular silhouette for a long time: According to my AI companion, CHATGPT and Claude, Praxiteles carved the Aphrodite of Knidos around 350 BCE. With that in mind, 2,400 years later we are still staring at her proportions. That gentle S-curve from waist to hip isn’t a Miami trend. It’s a benchmark the human eye has been holding us to since before there were mirrors.
I know “fat grafting” and “BBL” is a loaded phrase in Miami. The city has a reputation, and some of it is earned. Patients walk into my office having already decided they don’t want a BBL, and I can feel them brace when I bring up fat transfer as part of the Curvy Tuck.
I get it. So let me be specific about what I’m actually doing and why.
When you aggressively liposuction the flanks and back to create a defined waist, you inevitably create a contour change where the waist ends and the hip begins. If that transition is sharp or flat, you don’t get an hourglass. You get a rectangle with a pinched middle. It looks surgical. It doesn’t age well. And it doesn’t match the proportions your eye is subconsciously looking for.
A modest fat transfer to the lateral hip smooths that transition and restores the gentle outward sweep from waist to hip. Nobody looking at you from across the room notices the fat transfer. They notice that you look proportional, balanced, natural. The point isn’t volume. The point is contour.
For most of my Curvy Tuck patients, the grafting is a finishing step, the same way a tailor presses the final seams so the garment reads as intentional instead of altered.
Before Miami, I trained and practiced in the Los Angeles area, what I’d call the mommy-makeover capital of high-end aesthetic surgery. LA culture emphasizes restraint, natural-looking results, and the kind of finish where the work shouldn’t be obvious.
Miami’s strength is different. Miami is where I learned to liposuction and fat-graft at a level of technical aggressiveness that simply isn’t taught in most programs. The volume is higher, the expectations around curves are bolder, and the willingness to combine procedures is greater.
The Curvy Tuck is what happens when you fuse both philosophies. You take the LA ethos, it should look natural, it should look like you, it should not announce itself and you pair it with Miami’s technical toolkit for circumferential contouring and fat transfer. Either city on its own gets you part of the way there. Together, done thoughtfully, they get you the full silhouette.
I know there are cheaper options in this city. There are always cheaper options. And as with pretty much anything in life, tailoring and sculpting in particular, doing it correctly and safely the first time saves a tremendous amount of time, money, and heartache down the road.
I have built a quiet revision practice out of patients who came to me after a cheaper operation elsewhere didn’t give them what they were promised. The second operation is almost always harder than the first. The scar tissue is unforgiving, the anatomy has already been disturbed, and there are limits to what a revision can achieve that simply don’t exist on a first-time case.
I’ll probably write a whole separate post on revision tummy tuck pitfalls someday. For now, just know this: a Curvy Tuck is one of the most involved body operations I do, and it deserves to be planned and executed by a surgeon who has done it many, many times. Ideally, on the first go.
A tummy tuck fixes the front. A Curvy Tuck reshapes the entire core in 360 degree’s.
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Dr. Joshua Scurlock is a Cosmetic Surgeon and the founder of FusionMD Cosmetic Surgery in Miami, Florida. He specializes in body contouring and is the creator of the Curvy Tuck procedure. Schedule a consultation or call (305) 686-1122.
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