Lip augmentation, duck lips, and Lip lifts

What makes a Lip pretty? While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there are two characteristics that are found to be common to beautiful lips. Whether fleshy or thin, beautiful lips are often defined by a nice cupid’s bow and by having the perfect amount of space between the base of the nose and the top of the upper lip.

In this video, I illustrate the characteristics on several photos and discuss how patients interested in a Lip augmentation are sometimes better suited for a Lip lift to achieve the desired results. In fact, there are lots of well known Hollywood actresses who get filler hoping to recapture a youthful expression, or create a more beautiful upper lips, only to end up with “duck lips.”

Find out why augmenting the lip can sometimes cause duck lips and learn a very simple test you can do right in front of the mirror to help determine which procedure is likely to give you the look you’re after. You can learn more about Lip augmentation, duck lips, and Lip lifts in this blog post here. See real patient before and after photos in our Lip lift photo gallery and our Lip augmentation photo gallery.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Ricardo Rodriguez, and today we’re going to talk about lips. Specifically, augmentation of the lips or whatever to make your lips look better. Before we decide what to do to make lips look better, let’s look at what a pretty lip looks like.

Now, the most distinguishing characteristic of the lip is the cupids bow – it’s that line that goes from here to here on the lip and it looks like a bow. That’s why it’s called the cupids bow, and cupid, the god of love…

And the other one is amazingly constant. It’s a distance of 1.1 centimeters from here, the base of the nose, right there, to where the lip changes into the red part.

That distance is 1.1 centimeters, and I measured it on a woman who was 6’4″ and it was 1.1 centimeters and I measured it another one who was like 5’4″ and it was also 1.1 centimeters. Both of those were done today. It was incredible and I guess this is why I’m giving this talk on lips.

Anyway, a pretty lip can be fleshy, in some cases, or it can be thin and still be very pretty.

If it has those two characteristics of the nice cupids bow showing some of the front teeth with the short distance, the lip will be attractive, even if it’s not very fleshy.

Now, how can you tell what you need for your lip. Well, it’s a very simple exercise. You can do this right in front of the mirror today.

Just sort of hold your mouth slightly open like this, just leave your jaw slack, like that, and if you cannot see your upper teeth, forget about lip augmentation.

What will happen is, the minute you close your mouth, since the upper lip already goes past the teeth when the teeth meet, it’s already overriding a little bit on the lower lip.

Now, if you augment the upper lip, it has no where to go. It can’t push the lower lip down, so it has to go forward. And that’s how you get the duck lips.

There are many, many Hollywood actresses who do those augmentations wanting to recapture the look of their younger lip and what happens instead is they end up looking like Daffy Duck, or Daisy Duck, whatever the case may be.

Now, I think that some of those actresses, for example, one who might have a long upper lip even though she’s very young, might have benefited from an upper lip lift.

The lip lift is a great procedure. There are two types of procedures to get the lip lift.

The first one is called the Gullwing scar because the scar is right here, right along that line between the lip and the red part of the lip. I don’t like it. The reason is – the scar is right there, right in front. Hiding it with a little bit of lipstick doesn’t work because that white line is a very hard to recreate anatomic landmark. When you look at the lip from the side it has a little bit of a roll. And then when you look at it from the front, that same roll catches the light and gives a white line where the light shines on it and it creates a very subtle roll in there. And, so I like to leave that undisturbed.

Besides, you can get a lot of reshaping of the cupids bow by placing your incision right underneath the nose where it is well hidden. Those scars do great. I have slides of patients at a month, at four months, and at a month you can barely see something and when I take the picture at four months you can barely tell anything happened.

So the procedure can be done for both males and females. For males, of course, I leave a much longer distance. I leave a distance of about 1.5 centimeters. But it’s just a slight turning up of the lip, it just gives the lip a more youthful look.

Some patients have both a long upper lip and it’s also very thin. In those cases, well, you need both things. You will lift up your lip and you will recreate the cupids bow, but it may still be very thin and the patient might want to add something.

In those cases I will do a secondary procedure, either adding filler, or putting in a little implant.

I find myself doing a lot of lip lifts on patients who originally came in wanting some filler or saying, “I don’t want that exaggerated look.” Once you explain to the patient what the rationale is, they’ll go for the lip lift.

I love the procedure, I recommend it, but remember, you may not be a candidate for the lip lift if you are already showing front teeth.

If you’re showing front teeth already, you’ll do great with a filler and the filler’s entirely appropriate.

I think that pretty lips are great. I love pretty lips, and I love that we can offer this alternative to many people.

Thank you for listening to the blog again and I’m looking forward to the next one. Keep the questions coming, it gives me feedback and it gives me ideas so write any questions you like.

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