Full lips are an important sign of both youth and femininity. Although many aspects of women’s appearance such as large breasts or buttocks change over time, large lips are a consistent marker of feminine beauty. Unfortunately, many women do not have large, shapely lips and even women with large lips when young find that these lips often shrink as part of the normal loss of fat that occurs during the aging process.
If you have narrow, thin lips that contribute to an old, masculine, or severe appearance, you have several options for making them fuller and shapelier again.
Injectable Fillers
Because of the skin and internal texture of the lips, not all injectable fillers and treatments are good for lip augmentation. In augmenting lips, smooth texture is critical, so anything with a granular texture is inappropriate. This includes the composite fillers Radiesse and ArteFill, as well as the hyaluronic acid fillers Restylane and Perlane. In addition, the injectable treatment Sculptra gives poor results when injected in the lips.
Lip augmentation is almost the only treatment where collagen is still popular, although the allergy testing prerequisite and short lifespan continue to contribute to its decline. In its place, the hyaluronic acid fillers Juvéderm and, more recently, Prevelle are becoming the fillers of choice for lip augmentation procedures.
Fat Transfer
Unlike injectable fillers which give relatively short-term correction of thin lips, autologous fat transfer has the ability to give permanent correction to thin lips. In this procedure, fat is taken from donor sites in the body and re-injected into the lips. Although not all the fat survives the process, enough fat “takes” in the new location to correct the thin lips. Since this fat is now a living part of the lips, it behaves in all ways similar to your natural lip material.
Lip Implants
Following the success of other facial implants used for cheek and chin augmentation, cosmetic surgeons sought for a short period of time to use implants to give fuller lips to women. However, this proved to be very problematic. The lips proved to be too dynamic a location for implants, leading to migration and even ejection of the implant. At this time, the majority of cosmetic surgeons recommend against the use of implants for lip augmentation.
If you would like to experience full lips like you never had or used to have, schedule a lip augmentation consultation with a local cosmetic surgeon today.
