Over the last year we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of patients who are requiring corrective work. In general, most of this corrective work is around the mouth area. We believe this is due to repeated lip enhancement injections and the placement of the product. Have your lip fillers gone wrong? Don’t panic! We’re here to help.
Why Do Lip Fillers Go Wrong?
There are several things that can go wrong with lip enhancement injections. Firstly, the product within the lip which could have been injected too superficially. Secondly, the product may have migrated from the pink lip up into the white lip, which causes a ‘heaviness’ and ‘loss of definition’, often in the upper part of the lip.
This is obviously not the type of work we want to see; however, it has been predictable following the huge surge in lip treatments and the popularity of lip fillers over the last five to ten years.
How Do You Correct Lip Fillers?
In response to more mistakes and over-treatment, we are now having to treat these patients using a dissolving agent called hyaluronidase, which we use in hyper-diluted form in microbolus’ to try and reduce the filler.
How Does Lip Correction Work?
- Hyaluronidase breaks the filler down, reducing the filler in areas of heaviness and excess.
- Then we have to leave patients a couple of days, review them and maybe increase the amount of hyaluronidase.
- After two weeks we would then retreat the lip, placing that product very carefully in the right compartments.
Not only is it important that we keep the lip proportions accurate for the natural harmony and face shape and balance, but when you over-inject a lip with product, that product has nowhere to go and that’s what causes the migration. So, the over-injected lips with products either too hard or too soft or placed in amounts that are too large will either lump up, look unnatural, be very stiff, or move to the path of least resistance, which is often up into the white lip.
Do I need numbing cream for filler treatments?
How Can You Prevent This?
It’s really important not to over-inject the lip. If you start off with a very small lip you can go bigger, but you can never be like some of the Instagram lips you see out there which are very full. It’s about understanding the limitations as to what amounts you can inject and what you can’t. This is something we always work with patients very carefully on right from the start.
We are seeing more and more of these cases every week and the corrective work on these is extremely technical. It requires precision, it requires patience. It is not that comfortable, and it stings. We have to test-patch our patient’s before we even attempt to do this because the drug hyaluronidase has been known to cause negative reactions in some; more so than the filler itself. For this reason, we always test patch and wait before that treatment is given.
Why Is Lip Filler Correction So Hard?
The reason corrective lip treatments are so technical, and why patients should understand the limitations of these treatments, is that it is almost like creating an ice sculpture with a blowtorch. It is an enzyme that spreads, and it can be difficult to control. After years of treating people with hyaluronidase we feel that we have got a good technique for this, but it is not a perfect science. For this reason, you should always look to a very experienced practitioner for any corrective work.
How much does 1ml of filler cost?
Why Do Lip Fillers Go Wrong?
It is not necessarily practitioner error that causes ‘lip fillers gone wrong’, a small number of our own patients have experienced filler migration, so it can be either product related or it can be having multiple treatments over five or ten years and the cumulative effect of this on the lips.
Unfortunately, this is part and parcel of being an aesthetic practitioner and having to correct work from other practitioners, and also taking accountability for your own work. This means never treating a lip if it has been over-injected or there is product migration. It is important to address those concerns and help to bring patients back to the norm. This is a better alternative to just retreating and putting more filler on top of an undesirable result, because you will never get back to where you were; sometimes you have to start again.
The most important point is to consider this before you have your first lip injections. When you’re having your first lip filler injections, get it right!
Ready to improve your skin or take the next step with treatments? Book your complimentary skin consultation via phone call or video call by calling 01244308000 or email enquiries@jwaesthetics.com for more information.
Main image: by shahab yazdi