Smile. It's the second-best thing you can do with your lips.
Jill Shalvis

Next to our eyes, our lips are no doubt our most attractive and distinct facial feature. Plumb, perked-up lips are a sign of youth and sensuality. Our lips serve many purposes, display joy and happiness, help us speak, and demonstrate love and romance. Lip shape, contour, and volume are uniquely and intricately designed to achieve these functions.  

Age-related shifts in fat volume, deterioration of collagen and elastin fibers, and hormonal shifts are the main culprits of lip aging. External factors such as sun exposure, poor dietary habits, and tobacco smoke also harm the delicate tissues of the lips. Aging lips appear dry and thin, due to volume loss, with poor definition of the lip contour. These aspects often combine with the appearance of fine wrinkles and drooping of the corners of the mouth to contribute to the aged look of a person’s lips. 

Lip lift: surgery or fillers?

Rejuvenation of the lips involves:

  • Restoring lip volume and the natural ratio between the upper and lower lip.
  • Remodeling lip line contour.
  • Elevating the vermilion of the upper lip and the corners of the mouth.

The injection of hyaluronic acid fillers is a good option to achieve natural lip contour and volume. This option is appealing to many patients since it is safely and quickly done in an office setting by an experienced injector and requires little downtime for the patient. On the other hand, the effects of fillers in the lips only last a few months, so they must be reinjected to maintain the same result. 

A cosmetic surgical lift of the lip is better for patients with very thin lips who seek long-term improvements in their appearance or who are not good candidates for filler augmentation. This operation offers different cosmetic improvements by shortening the distance between the bottom of the nose and the upper lip, a space that increases in aged lips. In younger lips, this distance is short, voluminous, and curvilinear. With a lip lift, as this distance is shortened, the upper lip is rolled back and up, producing a more youthful, plump upper lip. Elevating the lip vermilion also helps reveal the upper teeth during smiling, a favorable and attractive attribute of younger lips. 

What is a surgical lip lift?

The cosmetic lip lift consists of surgically removing an angel wing-shaped fragment of skin from underneath the bottom of the nose. Only patients with elongated upper lips are good candidates for the procedure since skin resection may prevent full lip closure in people with short upper lips. 

A successful lip lift result lies in careful patient selection and preoperative planning of the amount of skin to be removed. Although skin removal should be tailored to every patient, 5 to 8 mm of skin is excised on average. It is better to be conservative and perform a touch-up if necessary than to incur complications from being too aggressive. 

The procedure can be done with only local anesthesia in an outpatient surgical facility or a minor procedure suite. For more anxious patients, intravenous sedation is a better option. Recovery from a surgical lip lift is quick and only slightly uncomfortable. Complications are rare if the proper surgical technique is employed. Revision surgery may be occasionally necessary if more skin needs to be removed or if the incisional scar requires improvement.