Miami performance artist to earn $20,000 from liposuctioned fat made into bars of soap

Two perspectives explain why a male performance artist is making money and a spurned Chinese woman is going viral. Both used their liposuctioned fat to make soap, apparently inspired by Tyler Durden, the character in the book “Fight Club” who manufactured soap from human fat sourced from liposuction clinics.

Orestes de la Paz, a performance artist in Miami, made 20 bars of soap by using three litres of fat from his body that was sucked through liposuction. But the fat only made up about 25 percent of the soap, while the remaining 75 percent came from other ingredients and oil.

De la Paz had a liposuction in December, reports Huffington Post. He apparently will profit because the bars of soap produced, on display at the Frost Museum in Miami, would be sold at a whopping price of $1,000 per piece. If he sells all 20 bars of soap for $20,000, then de la Paz would profit at least $17,000 based on an average cost of liposuction at almost $3,000, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgery.

The performance artist, who also washed the hands of those who attended the exhibit – which runs until May 19, 2016, using the soap – cites a line in the “Fight Club” said by Durden. He states, “We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them,” to explain how he benefits from his body fat.

In contrast, a Chinese woman named Xiaoxiao did it as another form of ex-sweetheart revenge, but it’s not revenge porn, rather perhaps revenge fat. Yang Xiaoei, her former boyfriend, allegedly broke up with Xiaoxiao because she was overweight. To exact revenge, she underwent liposuction and used the fat taken from her body to make a bar of soap, reports Mashable.

She then sent the soap to Yang as a Chinese Lunar New Year gift. Xiaoxiao included in the gift a letter which specifies that the only ones who should use her gift are Yang and his mother, who, likely was also critical of her body weight before the procedure.

To make sure that Yang did not only get the note and the soap, but also the whole world would know, Xiaoxiao posted on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, the whole process from her “fat” photos to Xiaxiao holding the syringe full of fat and the bar of soap. In response, Yang chastised his ex-girlfriend in a text message for pulling a publicity-generating stunt on the internet. He reminded Xiaoxiao that they are no longer in a relationship.