Caricature duck lips are no longer in vogue – star-tested. Celebrities who once enlarged their lips are now enrolled in a queue to reduce them. Nicole Kidman, Ivanka Trump, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Alba followed this path. But this does not mean that interest in lip augmentation has subsided.
We talked with the plastic surgeon “CM-Plastika”, Candidate of Medical Sciences Dmitry Saratovtsev about what operations on the lips are performed most often in Russia and the world today.
Lipofilling
This is an operation that replaced lip augmentation using biopolymer gel (popularly – silicone). Now this method is chosen much more often than the poorly proven biogel, especially since at the moment the trend towards naturalness is supported in the world. In plastic surgery, it is expressed in the fact that the effects of the operation are invisible. The advantage of the technique is that the patient’s own adipose tissue is used to correct the shape of the lips, this helps to reduce possible allergic reactions to zero and achieve the most natural result.
Usually fat cells are taken from the thighs, abdomen, or buttocks. Then the collected material is thoroughly cleaned and transplanted in small doses into the lips using small punctures. During the operation, you can be conscious and control the process, expressing your wishes.
As a rule, after the operation, the lips become slightly larger than the patient expected, but only because only 50-75% of the adipose tissue is engrafted, the rest of the cells simply dissolve without any harm to the body. For 7-14 days after surgery, slight swelling and pain may persist. In order to avoid possible complications, patients are not recommended during this period to consume alcohol and eat hot and spicy food; it is also worth avoiding active physical activity and visiting the sauna and pool. The operation can be repeated after 6 months, if suddenly you are not satisfied with the resulting volume.
Cheiloplasty
It allows you to correct the vast majority of aesthetic defects associated with the lips, from simple asymmetry to the cleft lip. Often, within the framework of this operation, surgeons have to deal with the consequences of incorrect lip augmentation procedures. It so happens that, for example, pronounced asymmetry of the lips is not congenital, but arises from the remnants of the biogel that was once introduced to the patient.
One way or another, when it becomes necessary to correct the shape and size of the lips, then we will most likely talk about cheiloplasty. This operation is now performed with four different techniques: VY-technique, Paris technique, shortening cheiloplasty and Bulhorn. As a rule, different methods are selected for different tasks. For example, the VY and Paris techniques differ only in the nature of the incisions, but in both cases they help to solve problems with the shape of the lips. Nevertheless, “Paris” is more popular today – thanks to the characteristic dissection, this operation helps to give the lips a heart shape. Shortening cheiloplasty allows you to reduce the excessive length of the upper or lower lip, and with the help of Bulhorn, the surgeon can correct the distance between the lips and nose.
It cannot be said that there has recently been any abnormal demand for such transactions; rather, interest in cheiloplasty is growing in parallel with interest in plastic surgery in general. But an important point: very pronounced lip defects (cleft lip or cleft palate) are now recommended in the world to be corrected at a very young age, starting from 6 months. This helps the child in the future to avoid problems with self-esteem and prevents possible psychological trauma from such defects.
Reduction plastic
Lip reduction is usually resorted to by former patients of plastic surgeons who once enlarged (or corrected) their lips using the old methods or who ended up with not entirely conscientious specialists. However, the patient’s natural lips may also be too large – here reduction plastic will also help. In both cases, the doctor removes excess tissue from the lips and corrects scars from previous operations (if any). As a result, the surgeon manages to achieve a noticeable improvement in the appearance of the lips, they become more symmetrical. By and large, reduction plastic is one of the types of cheiloplasty, but more and more patients have resorted to it recently, so it is worth highlighting it as a separate item: according to the statistics of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, the number of reduction plastic surgeries in 2016 increased by 283%. in relation to the previous year, while the number of lip augmentation surgeries increased by only 4%.