We all worry about saving up for the future, but a new "fat bank" is taking deposits to a whole other level.
Patients can have their fat removed via liposuction and tucked away for future use, thanks to a plastic surgeon's new Orlando, Fla., center, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
Some patients opt to have fat injected into other body parts to plump them up. If using fat from their own body, doctors usually have an hour to make the transfer.
Enter: Liquid Gold.
Dr. Jeffrey Hartog's center will deep freeze the fat after it's been harvested, according to the Sentinel, and will run a patient about $900 in storage fees for the first year. He told the Sentinel he would give all his lipo patients the storage option.
The Florida storage facility is raising a lot of eyebrows, but the idea of freezing fat for future use isn't new.
Scientists have experimented with several methods of fat storage, but have routinely been unsuccessful. But today, there are several banks throughout the world that freeze fat and tissue cells.
Patients in London are also opting to freeze their fat after going under the knife, sending their tissue to storage banks in Manchester, England, the Evening Standard reports.
And the tissue storage also has benefits extending past future cosmetic surgery.
In 2010, Texas doctors stored a 12-year-old patient's fat to inject in him as he ages. The boy was born with a birth defect, and surgeons plan to use the frozen tissue to reconstruct parts of his face, WFAA reports.
Dr. David Genecov opened BioLife Cell Bank in Dallas in an effort to preserve patients' fat tissue and stem cells until a later date. Genecov's procedure costs about $2,500 to retrieve and store the tissue, according to WFAA.
While the idea sounds good in theory, some adversaries say they still aren't sure about how well the cells once frozen.
"Animal data shows that frozen fat doesn't hold up as well as fresh fat," Dr. Daniel Del Vecchio, a plastic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, told the Sentinel. He said facial procedures only require a little bit of fat, that can easily be harvested on the spot.
Alex Bukrinsky, a tissue banking specialist, told WFAA that freezing gets complicated because "tissues are much more difficult to store because there's a lot of different cells."
Hartog argues that freezing fat negates the need for patients to undergo the somewhat costly and invasive procedure again, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
To learn more about Hartog's fat bank, read the whole story on OrlandoSentinel.com.