Lip Enhancement

A common topic that patients ask me about is lip enhancement. They bring in pictures (like the one above), desiring to walk away with similar results.

There is a variety of methods for doing this including fillers (such as Restylane or Juvederm), fat injections, or permanent implants. They all have their own individual pros and cons.

Restylane injections are relatively easy to do and tend to last around 3 to 4 months. At this point, not all the Restylane is necessarily gone however ladies do begin to notice some volume depletion at that point.

Fat injections are a potentially permanent way of augmenting lips. It is a common adjunct to doing a facelift. Fat is aspirated by liposuction from a different part of the body and then injected into the lips. Predictably not all the fat that is injected will survive. The fat that does survive can represent a permanent lip augmentation. I am not a fan of doing fat injections in younger people's lips. If they are at an age where they have weight changes, for instance pregnancy, the fat that you inject particularly if it is from the abdomen will grow as the abdomen grows. This is a better method of augmentation for people who are going to, by their best estimation, be fairly stable in weight.

The third and least popular form of lip enhancement is with permanent implant. Permanent lip implant can certainly look quite nice. In general they run the risks of having palpability of being able to feel the implant. Because this is a highly mobile area that also has a lot of bacteria there are also issues with extrusion and infection. 

Have any questions? Submit them to our website here.

Recommendations and advice are the result of experience and thoughtful, professional judgment. The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.


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Cellulite 101.

We are commonly asked about cellulite. The appearance of cellulite is caused by a couple different anatomical features.

The first is from loose skin. It's normal to have connections from the skin to the deeper layers. If this skin is too loose, it will hang causing dimpling. This gives the appearance of cellulite as the skin is essentially hanging from that point. The second is that the skin is tethered by too many and/or too short of those fibrous connections from the deeper layers out to the skin with the interposed fat causing bumps in the skin similar to a depressed button on a throw pillow.

The appropriate solutions for these two problems are predictably different.

For loose skin generally the solution is to cut his skin and do a lift. Depending on the body area this works variably well.

For people that do not have extra skin but have too many shortened connections between the skin and the deeper layers, there is a new solution called Cellulaze. This uses a laser to divide the connections that are dimpling the skin. Some liposuction is done to help even out the fat layers between the skin and the deeper layers.  I have very closely researched this technology and do believe that it is modestly effective. The only problem I found was that it is very expensive. We did a survey of various patients, all of which noted that cellulite was a significant problem and that they would be willing to pay to have a for a procedure to fix it. When they were presented with a series of before-and-after's of Cellulaze treatments as well as the price, only 2% said that they would be willing to proceed. Because of this, we have chosen not to offer the service in our office.

Have any questions? Submit them to our website here.

Recommendations and advice are the result of experience and thoughtful, professional judgment. The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

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