By Dr. TRACY MOUNTFORD, MBBS MBCAM
This week’s Q&A is all about lip lines – the bugbear of many women from the age of about 40 onwards. Whether it’s lipstick lines, smoker’s lines, these horrible lines that appear around our mouth make us look old, miserable, as if we’ve been smoking 20 cigarettes day, and we’ve never smoked in our lives!
It’s very common for me to see people who have very fine beginnings of these lines from a very young age, and, of course, as we get older and older, the collagen breaks down, the gums recede (no matter how good our dental hygiene is) and, together with genetics, many women can end up with very deep entrenched lipstick lines.
And of course, these lines can also be made worse by other lifestyle factors such as smoking and excessive sun damage.
There are a lot of myths about treating lips and one of the main ones is that many people fear that having anything done to their lips will leave them with a trout pout and this simply isn’t the case.
Depending on how deep the lipstick lines are, we can combine one, two, or even three treatment modalities, in order to give really natural, soft, rejuvenated lips. These treatments can include:
Skin boosting treatments: Skin boosting treatments or skin revitalization treatments often involve injecting little micro droplets of hyaluronic acid around the chin and lip area, in order to strengthen, hydrate, and stimulate new collagen production. This doesn’t give your lips volume, it simply just aims to smooth the area and makes the skin look firmer.
Hyaluronic acid filler: If there’s been significant lip volume loss as we age, which happens in a lot of women, we can just slightly redefine and strengthen the border of the lip with a hyaluronic acid filler. Again, I would stress this doesn’t mean a trout pout. This is something that should not look completely natural. It involves softly tracking along the border of the lip to strengthen the lip margin, because, as we get older, that area gets weaker and a lot of women even lose the pigmentation in this lip as well.
Tixel: The other thing we can do is combine either a laser treatment, or a radio frequency treatment, or a Tixel treatment, which involves using a heat source to cause the skin to remodel and tighten.
What’s absolutely the case is that you can achieve natural, beautiful results and smooth looking lip lines without having a trout pout.
For more information or to book an appointment, drop an email to [email protected].
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