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. 

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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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