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This podcast is going to be everything you wanted to know about lips. I could probably talk for 20 minutes, but suffice it to say that, I’ll try to hit upon some of the large items of understanding about lips. So I’m not going to talk about lip lines, but just lip volume. Everyone wants a fuller lip because it looks youthful with some exceptions. I do a lot of lip reductions for people that have overdone lips or they have ethnic lips. And so there may be some lips that look disproportional to their face, but oftentimes fuller lips is considered more feminine, could be considered more youthful. But the things that people don’t want to have is a lot of pain during the injection, a big recovery period. Um, and they don’t want to have a result that looks unnatural. So I’m going to touch upon those points right now during this podcast.

So the first thing is pain. Unlike other places where the pain is insanely bad I do a dental block. The dental block sounds scary and people have had dental blogs elsewhere and they go Dr. Lam, I don’t want a dental block. But my dental block has really pain-free and I think people just simply don’t believe that, but it really is and I don’t use epinephrine so your heart doesn’t race. It’s a very short block, typically lasts about 15 minutes to an hour. I don’t do a in for orbital block where I have to bring the needle all the way up into the eyelid area is simply very different. You won’t even feel the needle go in. It’s painless as a short block and it just makes the lips completely.

The second thing in terms of recovery, there’s always going to be a risk of bruising and swelling. Hopefully not more than a day or so, or a few days at most. But the way that I minimize that recovery is I first use a steroid pill, DECA drawn pill at the time of the procedure. There’s no charge for that. The second thing that I do is I use a cannula and a cannula basically is an instrument that is blunt in nature. So a blunt instrument allows me to minimize the risk of bruising. So that’s the part about the discomfort. So it should be almost zero or no discomfort. The next thing I want to talk about is naturalness. So the things that make a lip unnatural, first is that they’re not age appropriate. So someone coming to me, 40 years old that wants a 20 year old lip, it’s just not going to look right.

So a lot of people want their borders done. I hate borders. I don’t think they look good. So if you want borders done, you should not come to me because they look horrendous. The top lip cannot be that large. They actually has to be balanced to your bottom lip and it has to be there be the same size. If you are 20 years old, if you’re even 30 years old, that won’t look right. It should be about half the size of your bottom lip. So the size is important. Also, the other thing I see is in the outer portion of the upper lip, when the mouth is open, if you put filler there, it looks weird because it doesn’t terminate or end correctly. It looks like a bulge. So I don’t put it there either. The shape is so important. I create principally center of the top lip and I do, two little circular balls that taper and with a cleft in the middle of the lip, if you make the lip just uniformly big, it looks like a sausage.

You want to design in a way that looks appropriate. The other component people don’t think about is how the lip looks dynamically. So a lot of people say, you look, I don’t want my lip to become flat or smaller when I smile. I said, if it doesn’t do that, it looks unnatural. They say, no, I want to lip that stays full when I smile. But no natural lip really stays full when you smile, it should flatten and thin out. It’s when you have an unnaturally filled lip that it doesn’t do that. So that’s important to know that distinction. You know, people want cemetery, they want the look the same. You can never make two sides of the same. That’s an impossible goal. So you really looking at shape. The other thing with this is that the lips in dynamic situations. So we’ll talk about open mouth and we’re talking about smiling.

So when the mouth is open, if you have aging and you don’t want to lip lift or something like that and your upper lip is starting to hang above your top teeth, it’s already a sign of aging. And if I put more filler there, it could hang more. So I’ve got to look at how your lips look when the mouth is open. If you have some aging, interestingly enough, the bottom lip, which is so underrated, it’s an amazing way to look feminine age appropriate, so just do my top lip well you’re missing it. The bottom lip is sensuous, feminine, and awesome and it helps me balance the top lip. But the bottom lip, when you have a lot of teeth show, it actually makes you look older. So I want to cover the bottom teeth and I want to not, and I want to expose the top teeth. That combination is the best combination to make someone look more youthful. So there’s so many components that we don’t think about how the lip is shape and design, how it fits the face, how it fits aging, the order sequences should be done. I know there’s a million factors here, ethnicity, so I think this podcast just about basic lip design and lip shaping is so important. I will do a separate podcast in the future about lip lifts as well as lip reductions.