Note: Before reading this article, I recommend that you take a look at my article about lip augmentation.
The main issue with lip fillers is that they are temporarily effective and the application needs to be repeated every 6 to 12 months. These repetitions are tiring in the long run and they cause the total cost to swell. That is exactly why many patients have recently been demanding longer-lasting and even permanent options for lip augmentation.
I do not use permanent synthetic fillers (silicone, PMMA, etc.) on the lips.
I do not favor them.
Although permanent synthetic fillers are safe in most patients, they may cause severe infections, foreign body reactions and deformities in others. In my practice, it is unreasonable to take such a risk, even if the patient wants to.
The most reasonable option that can provide permanent fullness on lips is:
Adipose tissue transfer to lips.
This procedure is also known as lip augmentation with fat injection, lip augmentation with fat grafting or lip augmentation with autologous fat transfer.
Different names for the same procedure.
Unfortunately, this procedure is far from being an ideal option for lip augmentation.
That is to say:
Fat tissue transfer causes excessive swelling in lips.
The swelling is much more than that caused by Hyaluronic Acid fillers.
This swelling can stay for weeks.
In practice, only 10%-20% of the administered volume remains and the rest goes away.
If patients frequently move their lips, eat hot food or drink hot beverages, talk and laugh a lot and, in addition, smoke, this rate may decrease even further.
In routine practice, we apply 1 ml of Hyaluronic Acid filler to both the upper and lower lip.
To achieve a permanence with 1 ml of fat injection, it is necessary to apply 4-5 ml initially. This completely turns the lips into sausage/duck lips. It will then be very hard for a patient to join the crowd.
Therefore, unlike the case with Hyaluronic Acid lip fillers, you cannot get your transfer injection on, say, Friday and go out to have fun on Saturday evening.
In practice, restricting the volume of adipose tissue transferred to the lips reduces swelling but increases the number of sessions required to reach the target volume and, hence, the fee for the procedure.
Considering such peculiarities of lip augmentation with fat injection, we usually perform the procedure together with another surgical procedure. For instance, when we do it together with rhinoplasty, after which the patient normally stays away from social gatherings for 2-3 weeks to recover, the swelling in the lips mostly disappears during that recovery period.
Another disadvantage in lip augmentation with fat injection is that the procedure cannot create fine contours and details as if they were drawn manually, as in lip augmentation with Hyaluronic Acid fillers. The result will rather look like a “generally” augmented lip.
If we happen to learn that a patient we are going to operate for another reason routinely undergoes lip augmentation procedures, we recommend lip augmentation using their own fat, i.e. autologous fat grafting. Even if the administered fat mostly dissolves, the remaining portion reduces the filler volume that the patient will need in the future.
Restricting lip movements and applying cold continuously after the procedure significantly increases fat retention.
On the other hand, smoking can make all the fat dissolve.
Please feel free to contact us for more detailed information on lip augmentation with adipose tissue transfer.
Take good care...
... of yourself and your beauty.
O.B.