Lip Augmentation is a surgical procedure that performs the action of plumping up the lips and thereby reducing the instance of wrinkles around the mouth. Lip Augmentation can also help to correct a downturn of the mouth, due to loss of good skin texture, caused by the natural aging process, and aggravated in some cases by smoking over a long period of time.
Patients may desire lip improvement for a number of reasons. The lip(s) may be too thick or too thin, wrinkled, or simply aged. The typical features of the aged lip are that it has usually thinned, lengthened in a vertical dimension, has wrinkles which radiate outwards, has poor skin texture, droops, may be downturned, and when the mouth is opened the lower teeth are displayed first. These effects are usually worse in smokers. An aged mouth will affect your expression and can make you look grumpy, surly, angry, or unhappy.
If the lips are too thick or too thin tissue can either be removed or added. We prefer to augment lips with fat which has the advantages of being readily available and easy to harvest, free, easy to insert under local anesthesia, and safe with no adverse reactions. Although about 60% of the fat will be resorbed, usually what remains at 6 weeks will be permanent. Patients often benefit from repeated procedures. Other options for lip augmentation include using non-animal derived hyaluronic acid (such as Perlane or Restylane) which can be injected in the rooms.
Treatment for the aged lip is directed at the particular aspects which are undesirable. Fillers (fat, hyaluronic acid), resurfacing (peel or needling), Botox injections, and other modalities may be used on their own or in combination.