The “Bullhorn” Lip Lift [Small Procedures, Big Results - Part 2]

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome back to Behind the Double Doors. I'm Dr. Bob Basu. So we're hearing a lot about lip lifts, also known as a surgical lip lift, also known as a bullhorn lift lift. This is a really small procedure. I'm doing this in almost 80 to 90% of my face and neck lifts, and I tell my patients that let's say you decide not to do a surgical face and neck lift and the only thing you decide to do is a surgical lip lift. You're gonna look younger because this is a perfect example of a little procedure that makes a big, big, big improvement. So what's this all about? So as we age, the distance from your nose to your lip gets longer. And a lot of people feel that, well, I'm losing volume in my lip, so I gotta plump up my lip with filler. So sometimes patients choose to plump up their upper lip with filler, but we know the problem with that is too much filler can give you duck lips and it looks ridiculous.

(01:00)
Look, we've all seen it right in every town, in every city in the USA and around the world. So we don't wanna be overfilled. We hate duck lips, but we wanna balance the lip. So it's not that you're losing volume necessarily in your upper lip, it's that the distance from the nose to the lip is getting longer for patients as they age, or they're genetically born with a long nasal labial or nose to lip distance. So a surgical lift lift is a small little procedure that can be easily done under local or it can be done in conjunction with other procedures where I place and hide the incision right underneath your nose. And with that incision I trim some skin and fat. And then literally as the name of the procedure says, lift up the lip so that we can balance and reshape the upper lip and balance it with your lower lip.

(01:50)
And that everts meaning pulls up the upper lip. So yet it looks like you have more volume. What a surgical lip lift does is reduces the distance from your nose to your lip. Now if you look back at your photos from 10 to 20 years ago, I betcha you're gonna say, wow, my upper lip looked fuller. But what's probably going on is that the distance from your nose to the lip was shorter 10 to 20 years ago. So as we age, that distance gets longer and for some patients it gets longer, faster. For others it doesn't. But when you reduce that distance, and when I say reduce, you bring it back to what you had 10 to 20 years ago. That little procedure by itself, which takes 30 minutes to 40 minutes to perform and can be done by itself just under local anesthesia, makes a big difference because when you reduce the distance from the nose to the lip, it makes you look younger, more refreshed.

(02:44)
And a fringe benefit. A free be advantage is if you have those little up and down crease lines on your lip. Oftentimes it can soften those without the need for any filler. So surgical lip, lip is a great little procedure to yield a big result. So if you opt for a surgical lip lift by itself, the recovery is fairly quick. You can go back to work the next day. I generally tell my patients, just like with any procedure, don't work out, no heavy lifting or strenuous activity for about two weeks. We apply some antibiotic ointment. I do a cosmetic closure so there's no sutures to remove underneath the nose. And then we start scar massage therapy to make sure that scar fades away. We generally initiate that at about week three, and it's important to apply sunblock and sunscreen cuz as you know, UV radiation is not your friend.

(03:28)
It will want to make little incisions even if they're hidden red. But the wonderful thing is with a surgical lip lift, that little incision line is hidden underneath the shadow line of your nose. So the scar line is very, very forgiving. So where's the incision placed? Take your finger and place it underneath your nostrils. Okay, do you feel that you got a little groove right there underneath your nostril on the side of your nose, which is called a alar base. Feel that little groove there, that's exactly where we hide that incision inside that groove growing to the other side. And that's why that scar is really hidden in the shadow line of your nasal base groove. That allows that scar to really fade away fast. Cuz remember, when you place incisions in natural body crease lines, those scars are hidden and they fade away real fast.

(04:15)
So are there non-surgical alternatives to lip lift? There are. I mean, you can consider some fillers to plump up the upper lip. The advantage of fillers are that if you use a hyaluronidase filler, there's a reversal agent. So if you don't like it, you can reverse it. The downside of fillers is it's something you have to do every year or every 12 to 18 months, depending on the product. And sometimes with fillers, you have to keep plumping it up to get the desired effect, and the fillers are only volumizing your upper lip, camouflaging the distance between your nose to your lip. It's really not reducing the nasal labial or nose to lip distance. So fillers are really camouflaging the problem. It's not correcting the problem. So I think a surgical lift lip, again, very small procedure yielding a really big result. If you're listening today, we want to ask you for a special favor. If you love this podcast, if you learn something from it, if it's helped you follow the show, tell your friends and write a review on the show on Apple Podcast to get special updates and be notified by email when a new episode is available. Click the link in the show notes to sign up for our email list. Follow us on Instagram at Basu Plastic Surgery.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Basu Aesthetics and Plastic Surgery is located in Northwest Houston in the Towne Lake area of Cypress. If you'd like to be a guest or ask a question for Dr. Basu to answer on the podcast, go to basu plastic surgery.com/podcast on Instagram. Follow Dr. Basu and the team at Basu Plastic Surgery. That's B A S U Plastic Surgery. Behind the Double Doors is a production of The Axis, the axis.io.