Lip Surgery

About your surgery

If you are having a lip reduction, your surgeon will make an incision the length of your lip inside your mouth and will remove a strip of skin from one or both lips. His aim is to enhance the mouth and lips area to complement your facial features and give you a softer, more natural mouth.

The incision is closed with a fine absorbable suture. Do not be alarmed by the size of your lips after the operation. This is due to the operative swelling that will obscure the results for several weeks. Even though there won't be an immediate change, patients can expect a significant improvement in a few weeks' time. Since the incisions are inside, scarring is minimal.

For the long upper lip, a lip lift operation is available that has flattering results for the properly selected patient. Your surgeon will perform an incision at the base of the nose right at the junction of the nose and the upper lip. Skin is removed beneath the nose resulting in elevation of the lip. The incision is closed with absorbable suture that will leave a fine scar after healing. Complications are uncommon with this operation but could include infection, wound separation or unsatisfactory scarring.

The one hour-long operation is usually carried under local or general anaesthesia and takes about two weeks to heal.

If you have thin lips and opted for a permanent lip enlargement, your surgeon will use your own skin tissue. The tissue is harvested from the dermis, the deeper layers of the skin that comes usually from some other operation where it would otherwise be discarded, such as abdominal reduction, breast reduction, or facelift. The epidermis or outer skin is removed and the shaped dermis threaded through from one side of the lip to the other. This tissue takes well as a graft because it is the patient's own tissue, decreasing the risk of allergy. An alternative graft to dermis is fascia, the covering of muscle.

Your surgeon will have told you during the consultation that lip enhancement by graft is limited by the amount of vermilion or mucosa of the lip that is available. This type of surgery is recommended for younger individuals with enough amounts of vermilion available.

In addition to the operations mentioned above, Dr. Eleftheriou also performs excision of lesions of the lip and reconstruction for skin tumors and treatment of actinic keratosis of the vermilion.