Smile, kiss, and speak. That’s what lips let you do. They’re also a focal point of beauty and conveyor of health. In your youth, your lips are uniformly plump and vibrant, no matter their shape. By around age 30, your lips start to lose fullness and projection, and you’ll notice wrinkles that weren’t there before. By your late 30’s, the corners of your mouth have turned down some, and vertical lines appear on your upper lip. The distance between your nose and upper lip increases as you head into your 40’s, aging your face in profile view.
Aesthetic medicine can help reverse these changes with dermal fillers. However, not all lip-filler treatments are equal, and some result in an unnatural appearance. Whether intentionally aiming for excessive lip volume or accidentally getting too much of it, these lip caricatures (as seen on social media) keep many people on the fence about a treatment that could potentially benefit them.
At Aluma, we aim for the most natural results. When using dermal fillers to treat the lips, a clear understanding of anatomy is essential. Lips have five soft tissue prominences called tubercles – three in the upper lip and two in the lower. By focusing the filler treatment on the tubercles, the lips’ natural tapering from center to corners stays true. Light subsequently reflects from the fuller central area of the lips for a more aesthetically pleasing appearance.
Now, let’s talk about the vermillion border. This is the area between the lips and surrounding skin, where you might apply that rosy lip liner. This area should be distinct but not excessively full or defined. In general, we avoid injecting into this area as it can result in an excess projection of the upper lip and a duck-like appearance in extreme cases.
Then there are the corners of the mouth where the lips meet. They’re called oral commissures. As you age, these begin to slump, and with a “straight face,” you appear as if you’re frowning. It’s all due to the loss of connective tissue support and the downward pull of oral musculature. With precision, we inject at the oral commissures to restore support and return the corner of the mouth to a neutral position and a youthful appearance. Goodbye frowns.
Whether you’re still in your budding youth or older in full bloom, if you want to restore volume to your lips and improve their shape, we recommend dermal fillers.
