Dana Omari-Harrell is the 34-year-old, Houston-based content creator behind @igfamousbydana, an account dedicated to aesthetics and pop culture. Not a stranger to procedures, she considered getting a lip lift for nearly a decade before deciding to take the plunge. Omari-Harrell documented the entire surgical process for her followers on Instagram, from the good to the bad and the ugly. She’s thrilled with her results, which prove that a few tiny millimeters can make a huge difference in facial balance. This is her story, as told to Emily Orofino and edited for length and clarity.
I’d thought about getting a lip lift on and off for about 10 years. I had a longer philtrum, which is one of those things that reads as “older”—someone can have zero wrinkles, but you can still read their face as aged. I knew that taking about two or three millimeters off my philtrum would really balance my face, but I really didn’t like some of the lip lift scarring that I’d seen, and I was concerned it would happen to me. I’m an “in-between” skin tone; I scar more than people with light skin tones, but not as much as someone with dark or Black skin.
When I started working with board-certified facial plastic surgeon Dr. Regina Rodman, helping her to film procedures and post about them on social media, I watched her do some lip lifts—she’s one of the premier surgeons performing lip lifts on younger patients—and noticed that her patients have virtually no scars. She has a unique technique and performs double-layer suturing, so I decided to do it. That was in October 2023, and I got the surgery in February 2024.
I was awake for the surgery, which took less than two hours, including from the point when I took the medication pre-procedure. I was super loopy—they gave me a blend of ketamine and diazepam as well as laughing gas. She then injected 14 ccs of fluid with lidocaine, which did a lot of numbing—I couldn’t feel that part of my face for hours and hours afterward.
Then she got to cutting. I could feel pulling, warmth from the laser used to cut the soft tissue, the coolness of the scalpel and other tools—pressure and temperature but no pain. It was basically a deep plane lip lift: She cut the skin into a bullhorn shape, aligned with the shape of my nose, then cut into the soft tissue and sutured it up, then redraped the skin, lifting it up toward my nose—filler just pushes the skin out, which wouldn’t give me the result I wanted—and then sutured that. The suturing took the longest because she was very meticulous.
Later that day, I was home and eating tacos, feeling normal and fine. I took one pain pill—tramadol—that day because it started to feel like someone had punched me in the mouth, but I woke up the next day with no pain. I was swollen like crazy but had no pain—I couldn’t believe it. And aftercare was simple. I already sleep on my back; I wasn’t allowed to use a straw or eat anything too hard or super chewy, because that could pull on the sutures. Otherwise, I just had to keep the sutures hydrated. I really like Cetaphil Healing Ointment—I applied it every hour.
You don’t start doing scar care until the sutures are removed. Dr. Rodman uses dissolvable sutures for the soft tissue, but on the skin she doesn’t, because they don’t hold as well and may negatively affect healing. We took my sutures out after five days—once the area got red, that was a sign it was time for them to come out. Then I was just using RescueMD and silicone scar gel. It scabbed, which is normal, and then turned into dry skin. There’s some redness but not much. If I’m looking at you straight on, especially if I’m wearing makeup, you can’t see the incision at all.
I’m three weeks out, and I’m just starting to get feeling back in the area—it’s like when your leg falls asleep and you get that tingling sensation. It’s making my nose run and itch. Dr. Rodman said the area will take about a month to six weeks to go back to normal, depending on how strong the muscles are, but rarely does it take longer than that.
Since I work with Dr. Rodman, I paid less. She charges $4,500 for a lip lift; the industry standard discount from colleague to colleague is 50%, so I paid $2,250. It was a little less expensive than a lot of traditional lip lifts because there were no hospital or anesthesia fees—people usually go under and do a lip lift as part of a facelift.
Because I’ve worked in med spas and with plastic surgeons, I know that consumers and patients really don’t understand the process of recovering from surgery and that you always get worse before you get better. They don’t know because so few people like to document that process. People will freak out during the days after the procedure and think they’re botched. That’s why it was so important for me to show everything from start to finish. I wanted people to see how fast recovery is—and that it gets ugly before it improves. That way, if you do it, you’re more prepared. You’ll understand that “OK, I look like Marge Simpson now, but this will only last for a few days.”
I also wanted to show how common surgery is amongst celebrities. People think that there’s no way to recover from a procedure in three weeks, but within three weeks, makeup covers the incision completely. There’s definitely time for a celebrity to have this done, heal, and appear on a red carpet. You’ll either see a photo of them there—their smile would be affected—or see an edited Instagram pic.
My before and after photos help people understand the difference that surgery can make. I’ve had a blepharoplasty for my hooded eyes; I have a lot more eyelid space now, but I still kept a bit of the hooding. If you compare photos of me from before I’d ever had anything done to now, you’d be like, “Wow, that was a crazy glow up,” but it’s not enough that you wouldn’t recognize me if you hadn’t seen me in 15 years. People on social media are like, “Why get surgery if you’re going to make such a small change?” Doing what seems like a small or a subtle tweak will have a dramatic impact. I promise you, a little here and a little there will give you a “wow” result that looks very natural.
