Can I Enhance My Cupid’s Bow?

"Talking a little bit about lips. I've done a bunch of lips this week, and I've had so many great questions from patients, I thought I’d answer them for you, share them, and I encourage you to ask more questions if you have them.

It’s important to understand that there are different morphologies that really make up appearances or shapes that make up an attractive lip. Actresses like Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeanne Tripplehorn even to some extent Angelina Jolie, have a very strong lateral body to their lip and not so much central cupids bow, whereas other very attractive lips have a very strongly defined lip boarder and cupids bow. A good example of that would be Marilyn Monroe, for example, everyone knows that image.

So it’s not one lip type or one lip style that makes the lip attractive, it’s really the relative proportions of the lip, fullness which is a sign of youth, and the proportions being that the lower lip is always slightly larger than the upper lip. Typically and those ratios can vary, that the upper lip occupies quarter to a half of the entire lip itself, this is a white lip, this is the vermilion, we want to make sure that the red part of the lip occupies at least a quarter to be attractive. When it starts getting thinner and thinner of course, the lip becomes less significant or less attractive as a feature, and if you look at baby picture you'll see that the baby's lip really occupies more the vermilion portion or the red part of the lip occupies more than half.

In the cupids bow area, when we're talking about elevating it, there's no specific way to make the cupids bow in isolation come up with fillers alone, but we can certainly enhance that portion of the lip, right along the vermilion to make sure that the parts that make up the cupids bow, the two philtral ridges, and if that's not it’s called Paris lip from the 1980's when it was first described, and if we do the entire bows portion of the lip along with that, we really get very nice enhancement in the aversion of the lip.

Again, that doesn't make necessarily that lip attractive. If you have a nicely define cupids bow you want to enhance it further that makes your lip attractive, if you have a greater lateral body to the lip like the aforementioned actresses, it’s better to do a little bit of vermilion border enhancement and then maintain, just like Jolie and many of the other actresses do, maintain their lips with lateral fullness. We want to make sure that lateral fullness or the body of the lips, stays there.

There are surgical, options which I’ve described before, which I think are very important. The lip lift is a very, very valuable procedure. I do not like direct lip advancement unless its cases of cancer revision or other things or an incision is made right along the lip boarder because the white role, the natural roller comes off the lips in the key slope is lost when we do that in most cases, and so when I do advancement of the lip it is with an incision that's very carefully hidden inside the nostril and right along the border of the nostril rim, and the what's called the calumella the skin between the two nostrils.

In the nostril and along the nostril vestibule, the nose vestibule, the inside of the nose, and by doing that I can take out a portion of the white lip and literally lift the lip up and its central portion. That is a nice way of doing it surgically. There are certainly nice ways of enhancing the cupids bow, but no way of truly lifting it like we can do surgically.

So those are really good, they're technical questions, they are very artistic in their execution and you certainly want to go to someone that has a great deal of experience in, specifically lip beauty and enhancement, to get the very best results with that.

If you have any other questions about lip enhancement or augmentation, it’s a special favor of mine, please done hesitate to send me photographs or videos of your lip. It’s nice to see them animated but I can also see them in several different shots with you smiling and relaxed.

As always this is Dr. Corey Maas on "Looking Your Best."