While we may live in the desert, winter weather can bring a new type of dry climate to Palm Springs. With that often comes unpleasant and sometimes painful dry lips. Rather than reaching for another tub of lip balm, hyaluronic fillers may be a better long-term solution to finally putting chapped lips to rest.
Why Winter Weather is Damaging Your Skin
During the rest of the year, humidity helps to add extra moisture to the skin. During the winter, dry cold air has a drying effect on skin cells. While one would think that staying inside could help mitigate some of the damaging effects of winter weather, blasting the heater to stay warm as well as taking hotter than usual showers can have the opposite effect. As a result, skin becomes dried out and requires additional moisturization.
Lips are particularly vulnerable to damage caused by changes in the weather. While other skin cells can counteract dry air quality by increasing oil production, the lips don’t have oil glands. As a result, the tissue dries out faster than other parts of the body.
In addition to changes in the weather, behavioral changes can also increase the risk of lips becoming dry or chapped. While rich comfort foods may be a go-to for cold winter nights, these meals are often salt-heavy, drying out skin further. Not drinking enough water can also increase the likelihood of lips becoming chapped.
What is Hyaluronic Acid?
While most people know of hyaluronic fillers as an anti-aging solution, few are aware that the product has also been successfully used in the treatment of chapped lips for the same reason.
Hyaluronic acid is a naturally occurring substance found throughout skin cells across the body. The substance plays an important role in keeping skin looking ageless by helping the cells retain moisture. While hyaluronic acid production doesn’t slow like collagen and elastin, environmental factors and the natural aging process can certainly outpace production. This causes the skin to lose its ability to hold onto much-needed volume and accelerates the appearance of aging.
Unlike other dermal fillers, hyaluronic-based injectables rely on the naturally-produced substance to add volume to the target area. When applied to fine lines and wrinkles throughout the face, this type of filler helps rejuvenate skin cells, giving them the ability to retain moisture as well as stimulating collagen production.
Repairing Your Smile with Hyaluronic Dermal Fillers
The same concept comes into play when HA fillers are used to repair dry winter lips. By strategically applying fillers to the mouth, patients can rejuvenate lip skin cells, helping them retain much-needed moisture during the driest months of the year.
There are several advantages that come with the use of hyaluronic dermal filers. For starters, the ease of treatment and longevity makes the option highly attractive to patients looking for a no-fuss, effective answer to chapped lips. Dermal fillers can usually be applied in just one visit to our Palm Springs office, making it easy to schedule an appointment during an extended lunch break. As most HA fillers last up to six months, most patients are able to come in at the start of the cold season and can enjoy their results without needing touch-ups during the busy holiday season.
Longevity and consistent results present another reason why many patients are choosing to use hyaluronic dermal fillers as their lip repair treatment. As the filler material is applied discreetly, the results look very natural, alleviating fears for many patients concerned about having too large lips. Best of all, the material gradually and safely dissolves into the skin, meaning that if patients choose to not go through with touch-ups after winter, they can easily slide back into their former appearance.
Repair Your Smile with Dr. Kato
At our Palm Springs cosmetic practice, our team is committed to providing patients with the highest quality care in a state-of-the-art practice. When helping our patients overcome their struggles with dry chapped lips, our in-depth consultation and personalized approach to care ensure that all individuals receive the long-term results they’re looking for. Call 760-610-5558 today to learn more and schedule your visit today!
For many, Valentine’s day is the first important festivity of the new year. A celebration of love and friendship, Valentine’s day gives us a chance to express our full beauty and gratitude towards those we love in our lives.
To ensure you look in top form this Valentine’s day, Dr. Maya Kato in Palm Springs offers this advice on lip and facial care.
For everyone, the lips have the potential to be the most appealing aspect of their face. Full, sensual lips are the embodiment of youth, health, and beauty. Today, lips such as these are known as ‘trout-pout’ or ‘keyhole pout’ lips, and they don’t have to be reserved for the rich and famous.
What’s more, a life full of emotion means the skin around our mouths is constantly being moved and flexed as we laugh, smile, frown, and cry. This results in the gradual appearance of rhytides, or small skin creases and facial lines. An essential aspect of a perfect Valentine’s day face is smooth skin surrounding your full lips, giving you a healthy, vibrant appearance.
With the following advice, you, too, can achieve a set of full luscious lips and smooth skin this coming Valentine’s day. First, let’s take a look at why people are attracted to the trout-pout.
Why Full Lips?
Full lips in adults are what scientists refer to as “neotenous features” – juvenile physical traits possessed by an adult. Other neotenous characteristics, such as large eyes and protruding cheekbones, are also considered physically attractive features.
People find these traits attractive because of their expression in juveniles. It stems from an inherent biological urge to care for and protect our young. Large eyes, full lips, and high cheekbones signify youth and as such vulnerability, which provokes care-giving emotions in adults.
This is why many plastic surgeons are asked to enhance the fullness of people’s lips, along with making the cheeks fuller and the eyes larger through dermal fillers and eyelid surgery. Adults desire these youthful features because it makes others warm to them.
Lip Injections for Youthful Lips
For a long time, full lips, or the ‘trout-pout,’ were reserved for those with incredibly lucky genes or those who had access to pricy celebrity plastic surgeons. This is no longer the case.
A relatively straight forward cosmetic procedure, lip injections, give anyone who desires it the opportunity to have full, youthful lips.
Obtaining the ‘trout-pout,’ a la Kylie Jenner, is done by injecting dermal filler compounds into the upper and lower lips. Skilled cosmetic surgeons are able to provide patients with an array of lip aesthetics, including heavy upper lips, heavy lower lips, wide lips, heart-shaped lips, or downturned lips. The choice is up to the patient in how they wish their mouths to look – by choosing a trained, certified and experienced cosmetic doctor, patients will obtain the results they desire.
The procedure may appear simple, but to inject the correct quantity of filler into the precise area of the lips to provide the desired aesthetic is no easy feat. Many patients learn the hard way and choose inexperienced people to do their lip fillers, they end up looking overdone and unnatural.
When considering who will do your lip fillers, you should always ask about certification and training, and ask to see the doctors’ gallery of before and after photos on other patients.
To complement their now full, youthful lips, many patients complete their Valentine’s day facial rejuvenation by smoothing out the skin surrounding their mouths. This is done using other dermal fillers.
Dermal Fillers for Smooth Skin
Small facial lines inevitably appear on everyone’s face. Fortunately, cosmetic doctors have refined their techniques and now have a solution for any degree of facial creasing and wrinkling.
For creases beginning to form in the soft sensitive skin that surrounds the mouth, aestheticians administer exact quantities of small-compound dermal fillers. These allow precise smoothing of the skin by restoring lost volume and gently plumping the skin in areas of fine lines and wrinkles.
Like lip fillers, dermal fillers for the skin are not permanent solutions. But, quick treatments a few times per year can maintain your results and keep you looking youthful.
In preparation for Valentine’s day, the combination of these two procedures is just what the doctor ordered. Please call Dr. Kato 760 610 558 or fill in her online form to get expert advice from the Palm Springs top doctor to help you look your best.
Recently, the digital community went into a bit of a crazy spiral as people attempted to obtain a set of Kylie Jenner Lips. Some clever cookie figured out you can temporarily swell your lips by sucking them through a glass bottle, thus obtaining a fuller pout for an Instagram pic. They also figured out this is a pretty good way of incurring painful bruising.
If emulating your favorite Hollywood star’s trout-pout is your goal, let us recommend one of the following procedures instead of the glass-bottle method. You’ll get far more bang for your buck, and results that last much longer.
What you also might want to know is how different celebrities obtain their varied looks. In particular, some celebrities choose a more permanent solution to enhancing their lips, and opt for a surgical lip augmentation. Alternatively, many also choose less permanent but faster options such as dermal fillers. Here, we discuss three main types of lip enhancements that have different aesthetic results.
First, let’s have a quick look at why we are so lip-obsessed. This insider info may help you make a wise decision as you decide which lip-augmentation procedure is correct for you.
Why Do We Consider Full Lips More Attractive?
Though it may sound strange, our attraction toward individuals with full, pouting lips probably stems from an innate desire to care for that person.
Full lips in adults are what scientists refer to as a “neotenous” feature – meaning they are juvenile characteristics retained by an adult. Typically, juvenile facial characteristics include large eyes, protruding cheekbones, and full lips – physical traits that signify youth. And as humans are, at base, social, caring creatures, these juvenile physical traits prompt positive caretaking responses from other people.
The youthful nature of full lips makes other people instinctively warm toward that individual. But how can you best achieve full lips without sticking your mouth in a vacuum?
While dermal fillers are one option, many people also consider a more permanent lip augmentation procedure, such as one of the following.
Vermilion Lip Advancement
Vermilion is the pink, reddish part of the lip, and is what defines the lips on our face. Our lips are pinkish-red because the skin here is particularly thin, and reveals the blood vessels close to the skin surface. The vermilion border is the boundary of our lips’ delicate skin and our thicker facial skin.
As the name of the procedure implies, a vermilion lip advancement extends the pink skin of the lips. We can achieve this goal by removing some of the skin above the vermilion border, thus repositioning the vermilion border of the lips and making the pink skin more prominent.
Lip Lift
There are two different types of lip lift. One lifts the upper lip, and the other lifts the corners of the mouth. Both of these procedures result in a more friendly, relaxed complexion, and like the vermilion lip advancement, increases the prominence of the vermilion border.
During an upper lip lift, the surgeon excises some of the skin between the upper lip and the base of the nose. By doing so, they pull the upper lip up and out, thus revealing more of the pink skin of the upper lip.
A corner lip lift sets the corners of the mouth slightly higher, thus creating a small, permanent smile.
Both the vermilion lip advancement and lip lift are surgical procedures. If you would prefer a faster, less drastic fix for your mouth, you may consider the viral “keyhole pout” technique.
Keyhole Pout
Achieving the keyhole pout relies on dermal fillers injected into the upper and lower lips. These celebrity lip injections create a subtly sexy divide between the upper and lower lips. This lip augmentation procedure provides satisfying results, but they don’t last as long as their surgical counterparts.
If your lips lack volume, shape, and pout, consider a lip augmentation procedure. Many patients get highly satisfactory results with the vermilion lip advancement or a lip lift procedure, but if you are unsure whether surgery is right for you, perhaps choose dermal fillers first to see the results.
Dr. Maya Kato, founder of Aesthetic Art Facial Rejuvenation, is a board-certified plastic surgeon specializing in facial cosmetic surgery. Her clients have voted her Palm Springs Life magazine’s Top Doctor for seven consecutive years due to the unmatched patient experience she can provide. To consult her about your lip-enhancing procedure, please don’t hesitate to call 760-610-5558 now or fill out her online form to arrange a consultation.