Restylane is a popular dermal filler used to plump up the appearance of the lips. In this short video, our Board Certified surgeon Dr. Fadi Nukta shows exactly how Restylane injections for lip augmentation are done. He also explains exactly what differentiates a good lip augmentation from one that looks unnatural.
“Hello, I’m Fadi Nukta from NOVA Plastic Surgery. I’m going to show you today how we perform lip augmentation using Restylane. It’s very important in order to get good results to first understand the anatomy of a normal lip.
The two lips connect to each other with a commisure or the corner of the lip. The lower lip does not have a lot of anatomical features except for some dimple. The upper lip on the other hand has the phitral columns and cupid’s bow. This is a very important structure to preserve when we’re performing a lip injection; therefore, whenever we inject (and you’ll see in this demonstration) we don’t go past these lines in order not to violate them. If you look also, the lower lip anatomically is a little larger and more pouting than the upper lip. In order to maintain that relationship it is always important not to inject the *upper* lip to make it bigger than the lower lip, that gives a very unnatural appearance. Another thing that will prevent an unnatural appearance of the lip augmentation is that when you look at the commisure of the lips, there is not a lot of lip showing on the corner of the lip. Therefore when injecting, it is important not to inject any or very little amounts product in the commisure. If this is injected too much then it will give this kind of a fake look that you can see on some people when they have the upper lip injected all the way to the corner and much more than the lower lip is injected.
So again, I don’t like to inject on the commisure, I’ll just go a little beyond it and stop my needle at the phitral column and inject very slowly as I pull the needle back. Then I always go in the lower lip as well but very gently as I stated her lower lip is already a good size so we don’t really need to augment it but we need keep it more prominent than the upper lip. We need to get into cupid’s bow from the other side just a very little amount. And now I’m going to massage her upper lips to make sure that the product is evenly distributed and make sure that there is no lumps.”