Lips-Beautiful Lips!
Welcome to our Blog series on Treatments for Beautiful Lips
Lip beauty is important to many of our patients. We hear every complaint possible such us:
“They are too small”
“I have too many lines”
“I want a different shape”
“I want them fuller at the edges”
But then we hear-
I want to improve them but I don’t want them to-
“Stick out too much”
“Look like a duck”
“Change my smile”
“Look too big”
There are many approaches to lip enhancement. There is not a ‘One size fits all”. It’s a complex subject that usually requires a consultation so we can address the issues specific to your lips. We don’t find photos of other people’s lips are a help. We can enhance your lips, not give you another pair!
So let’s start with the fundamentals. What can you do to help your lips?
- Stay hydrated. Lips are comprised of thin tissue and get dehydrated. Habits such as licking them tends to dry them out. When they are dry, they look wrinkled. Balms help as well. We highly recommend Ormedic Lip Enhancement Complex by Image Skincare. It is extremely emollient and will last for hours. Apply at bedtime and you can still feel it when you wake up. Wear it over lip products for even longer lasting wear. We also love the SkinMedica HA5 Lip Treatment Kit that contains 5 types of hyaluronic acid to hydrate lips and a special lip plumper as well.
- Don’t smoke! Smoking is one of the biggest causes of lip lines. Your skin grabs the toxins in the smoke and it prematurely ages your skin and lips.
What can we do to help your lips?
They are three different approaches in our practice, depending on your particular issues. Some patients are pleased with just one of the options, others need two or even all three options. With a consultation, we will spend time to review the pros and cons, the risks and benefits, and of course, the cost.
One option for improving the lines around the mouth is the use of laser treatments. Dignity Medical Aesthetics most often encourages the use on non-ablative fractional resurfacing (we call ours the “1540”). This treatment is relatively inexpensive, has very little downtime, and with each treatment there is collagen stimulation or “Remodeling” that helps stimulate your own body to “Fill in the lines”. Typically a series of 3 treatments, each a month apart is recommended for mild lines.
For deeper lines, we recommend Ablative fractional resurfacing. We call our treatment the “2940” and this treatment has more downtime. You can count on 4 days of having to stay home, use compresses every few hours and no use of makeup until the skin has healed from this mild “Burn”. However, for deeper lines, this treatment is more effective. Some patients even have more than one of these, each several months apart, to get to that desired end point.
Pros to the use of laser is that is stimulates long lasting improvement to your skin itself.
Cons to the use of laser treatments can be the downtime, a risk of infection (rare) and blisters (rare). Fully ablative laser, which fully destroys the outer layer of skin, can cause the permanent loss of pigment, or hypopigmentation. Dignity Medical Aesthetics does not use fully ablative laser.
Another great option to enhance the appearance of your lips is BOTOX. This is actually the starting point for many of our patients in their pursuit to improve the look of their lips, which may surprise you. The purpose of this treatment option is to relax the pursing action of the lips with Botox. This is an “Off label” (not approved by the FDA) but commonly used treatment that can soften lines and for minimal lines, even make them go away while the Botox effect is active. It can also cause “Eversion” of lifting of the edges, which many patients love as a way to lift the lips without the use of filler.
Stay tuned for next week’s blog on Lip Filler treatment options!