I recently carried out cosmetic surgery on a patient who had had tummy surgery as a baby, leaving her with a large scar across the lower part of her stomach. We were able to offer this patient a tummy tuck – or abdominoplasty - a cosmetic surgery to improve the shape of the tummy area (abdomen) by removing excess fat and skin and tightening muscles.

For the vast majority of us – and that includes you if you have any reasonable quality scar anywhere – scar quality depends much more on what happens around the time it is healing: for instance, whether it is pulled or stretched, gets infected or if there is dead or injured tissue for your body to deal with.

An abdominoplasty is a surgical procedure which improves the shape and appearance of the abdomen. There are several ways of performing it, reflected in slightly different names such as full or mini-abdominoplasty, fleur-de-lys abdominoplasty, lipoabdominoplasty, high lateral tension abdominoplasty and so on.

If there’s not too much fat to remove combined with good skin quality, fat removal alone will work; whereas if skin quality is poor and there’s lots of fat still to remove, the skin would need to be retightened to get the best outcome.