Plastic Surgery on Aging Lips

Lip Augmentation, Plastic Surgery Comments (0)

Last month’s Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, a professional magazine for plastic surgeons, carries an article on what happens to aging lips.

Until now, most consumers — and quite a few doctors — believed that lips become thinner as we age because the volume inside the lips had diminished.

Solution? Lip augmentation, big time! Fill those kissers with collagen, Juvederm, Radiesse and whatever works.

There is even a lip augmentation procedure that implants strips of Gore-Tex to make lips seem fuller. Another procedure – verafil — inserts a small, saline-filled implant inside the lips.

And what happens?

Too often, some of Hollywood’s most beautiful faces wind up gracing bad plastic surgery websites, labeled with non-sexy attributes like:

• Duck lips
• Trout pout
• Sausage Lips
• Fish lips

For ordinary patients, plumping up the lips is risky, at least according to realself.com where only 54 percent of 67 lip augmentation patients said the procedure was worth it.

That’s about the same odds as a coin toss for having a good outcome.

So let’s go back to square one and see what the doctors found about how the lip ages, the first such study.

During autopsies, the researchers took 20 lip samples of a group with an average age of 40 and from another group who averaged 80.

While the study was done on upper lips only, the doctors found the aging was mostly caused by the shrinking of some muscles around the lips and sagging due to loss of elasticity, “…rather than the often-postulated but unproven total volume loss.”

Lessons learned? Go easy with volume replacement! Ask your plastic surgeon to consider the balance of your lips in relation to the rest of your face.

For instance, the upper lip should be about one-half to two-thirds the size of the lower, to appear natural. The distance from the top lip to the nose is also important.

Too much plumping can ruin the vermilion border, the line where the red of the lip meets the surrounding normal skin of the face.

To augment your lips, your own particular face structure may call for:

• Corner lip lifts
• Augmentation of the marionette lines
• Expression surgery

Like most procedures in plastic surgery, your surgeon should have an artistic eye and lots of experience with lips.

Look for a doctor who has pages and pages of before and after lip augmentation pictures.

admin @ September 2, 2009