What is a Subnasal Lip Lift? Understanding Lip Lift Surgery

https://DrBalikian.com This is Dr. Richard Balikian from Balikian Plastic Surgery, discussing our comprehensive Artiste Lift. An important component of that is a subnasal lip lift. Our lips age just like everyone else, with gravity causing them to lengthen over time. The pink part of the lip starts rotating inward.

So what does that look like? It looks like someone with too long a skin between the upper lip and the nose. Every time they talk, you never see their teeth because the lip is covering them, giving a subtle cue of aging.

If we do our Artiste Lift and everything looks great, but you still have a long lip, something is just off. My goal is to achieve a harmonious, artistic result that looks balanced and pretty without drawing attention to itself.

What do we do? We perform a subnasal lip lift, not to create a voluptuous lip, but to restore balance.

A traditional lip lift involves an incision underneath the base of the nose, where a few millimeters of skin are removed. It is stitched together deeply with stitches to the skin. However, the problem with traditional lip lifts is that they go too far up the corners of the nose, and there isn't enough support under the skin to hold it. As a result, the scar becomes thick and unattractive, almost like railroad tracks.

We fix that by switching to a deep plane subnasal lip lift. The difference is that while we still make the incision under the nose, we don’t have to extend it all the way up the sides. This allows us to hide the incision where no one will see it in pictures.

Once we remove the skin, we don’t just stitch it up. We release the rest of the skin off the muscle so that it can gently roll up and slightly curl the lip, shortening it. We use deeper stitches that really support the lip, with no tension on the stitch lines.

This approach provides an impeccable result, and we can also balance out asymmetries. Some people have one part of the lip lower than the other. The beauty of the way we do things is that we're not just removing a uniform amount of skin and leaving those asymmetries. Instead, we work to fix them.

This is a critical part of why a consultation matters. It’s great to have all the information and think, “Okay, this is what I need,” but there’s still artistry in the diagnosis. That’s why I love spending time with my patients during consultations to understand their goals and concerns. I look at pictures of them when they were younger and create a bespoke plan that fits their unique features.

This approach leads to a beautiful, natural-looking cupid’s bow and lip, seamlessly integrated with the rest of their aesthetic results.

#LipLift #LipLiftSurgery #LipRaiseSurgery

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BALIKIAN FACIAL PLASTIC SURGERY
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LEARN MORE ABOUT DOUBLE BOARD CERTIFIED FACIAL PLASTIC SURGEON DR. RICHARD V. BALIKIAN
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