Those of you that don’t know me, my name is Rita and I am the clinical director of the Peppermint Group. And today, we’re going to be talking about making your lips fuller and how I do my signature pouts.
So, today, we’re just chatting about people coming in who want to have a fuller pout but they don’t want anyone or any of their friends, or partners, husbands, to know. And that is my signature. I will always give you a natural pout and we will discuss today how we do that.
When you first come in, we have a face to face consultation. We discuss all your concerns and desires in a comfortable relaxed environment. We don’t, on that day, have to do the treatment unless you are happy to go ahead and you’ve understood everything we’ve said. But we do do quite an in depth consultation on what kind of look you’re looking for, what your concerns are, and what you would like to improve.
Initially , once you’ve decided you want to go ahead and get lip fillers, we would use quite a lot of numbing gel to numb the lips and that allows us to take the edge off of being a little bit uncomfortable when you have some injections done, as your lips are a very sensitive area. There is a lot of nerve endings, a lot of blood vessels in that area, so just popping a bit of topical anaesthetic on the lips just tends to take the edge off from any treatment we do.
What type of treatment would you want and why you would choose To come to myself and have this treatment done? If you are having a lip procedure done for the first time, we always suggest that you go for just half a ml of filler initially, just to give it a subtle improvement because we don’t, especially your first time, you’re not sure of what swelling you’re going to get, whether you’re going to bruise, and half a mil is a nice place to start. It allows you to just dip your toes in the water, gives you a chance to see how it looks. When you see these beautiful pictures on Instagram of some of these celebrities, they have not suddenly gone from smaller lips to bigger lips. It’s taken a few months, and maybe even years, of layering product. They would have started also with a small amount of product, like half a ml and then built that up with multiple visits over a year.
When you have decided you want to go ahead and we are decided with what quantity of filler, there are multiple different techniques that I have mastered. I’ve been trained in facial aesthetics for approximately 19 years. My background is that I qualified as a cosmetic dentist in 1999. And after that I found a special interest not just in cosmetic dentistry, but in facial aesthetics as these things all improved what we were trying to achieve with improving the smile. For example, I had a patient come into the clinic saying, “Oh my teeth are uneven,” but actually, when I looked at them, maybe their lips were a little bit uneven and it made more sense to do some filler than to drill away tooth structure for some veneers to be fitted. Over the last 20 years I have picked up and done multiple masterclasses from some of the world’s greatest injectors, to get different techniques in my professional repertoire, to be able to show you what we can and can’t do.
When in clinic we look at your lips and look at what the border of the lip is like. Top and bottom. What the surrounding tissues around the face are like. What the cupid’s bow is like and projection, and also the width of the bottom lip compared to the top lip. And in the most perfect world, when you see amazing celebrities that have had work done, they probably have not just had work done there, they’ve probably had their other features changed slightly too to go in with the big lips. Angelina Jolie’s a perfect example of that. She’s had her cheeks and jawline enhanced to be able to accommodate the big lips.
The ideal ratio that we always use is a 1 to 1.6 ratio, and that 1 to 1.6 ratio is what we call PHI or the beautification process. With my experience I can now do that by eye, but we do have tools in the practice to show that the top lip should always be slightly smaller than the bottom lip and that is what is beautiful to the eye. Years ago, back in the 90s when the industry injectors were doing lips, the trend was to have this very big, full top lip, and thankfully I managed to talk most of my patients out of doing those kind of lips tail end of 90s and early 00s. That was a 90s trend to have that big overly corrected pout. So the ratio is always 1 to 1.6. We want to try and keep the top lip slightly thinner than the bottom lip and we want to use very small amounts of filler, and it’s depending on how we inject, depending on where the lip is.
So if the top lip is sitting slightly back , we put the filler into the body of the lip, of the top lip, to bring that lip out. And the same on the bottom. If the top lip is already out, we would then correct with the bottom lip in the body of the lip to make it fuller. But the top lip, in order to give you a fuller look without projecting the lip forward any more, because that’s really obvious it is like a Marge Simpson look, which we do not think is attractive. We always want to look at yourself in profile as well. Profile is very important.
For those patients that want a fuller look but not projection we inject using a microdroplet technique, which allows to just lift the lip up and look fuller. That is called the micro droplet or nano-droplet technique. These techniques have taken over 19 years to master and one size shoe does not fit all. This is why you will see, I’m sure some of you have friends, colleagues that have treatment done elsewhere that when you look at them and they’ve put beautiful selfies up on their social media etc, they look fantastic. However they have been to a practitioner that has just put lip filler into the body of the lip and they haven’t taken all of the plains into consideration. It’s very important to look at your lips in all different profile angles.
Now we’ve talked about correcting the volume and the ratios, just with the lip on its own. And we’ve talked about pulling the lip and creating shape.
At the end of the day, your lips need to fit in with the rest of your face. So when we look at the person’s face, we always split the person’s face into a third, third, third. And these should all be pretty much the same ratio. Now, I’ve had a lot of work done to have that corrected in my own face. However, I was more disproportionate at some point. So my lips have been enhanced, and I had quite small lips compared to the rest of my face. And also I had my cheeks lifted to make that work.
So today obviously we are just talking about lips, but we need to keep into consideration the rest of the face. I don’t know whether any of you might have seen some of their colleagues and friends, again maybe they’ve had lips done, and this bit here, when they get their lips, this always looks quite cartoon-like. It looks a bit like this. And its actually true, because when you used to draw cartoon or drawings when you were younger, you used to always draw these kinda lines very prominently in the lips. So when you have lip filler done, again your practitioner, clinician, I will like myself, always check the nose to mouth, the marionette lines that go down here at the corner of the mouth, so what you may find when you’re in the clinic with me and you’re having treatment done, that if I have a bit left I will try and place them in that triangular area at the corner of the mouth to and give you a bit of a lift and an upward smile.
There are also a couple of other options, which we can talk about on some other live feeds in the next coming weeks, is where we want to pop some filler or threads just to help lift cheeks and jawline and also just to kind of help to tighten these areas too. The lip area and lips always look better when you do this. I look forward to welcoming you in clinic and look forward to helping you through your aesthetic journey.
Dr Rita x