Will wiping your mouth with a damp napkin after dinner and meals mess up lip filler Juvederm or make it go away faster?

There’s really nothing you can do after getting lip fillers that’s going to affect the outcome.
Different providers may say different things, but I’ve never had a patient be able to change the outcome.
Likewise fillers do not migrate regardless of what other people will tell you.
I believe the concept of fillers migrating is simply a poor excuse to cover up for badly done work.
Finally, there is substantial differences, depending who you choose for lip fillers.
Some people are terrible at this procedure and continue doing bad work. Other providers are exceptional.
Recognize that most providers are average and average isn’t really all that great.
Only exceptional providers do exceptional work and finding exceptional providers in a world of self promotion may be challenging.
Bad work is undesirable and We see these people all the time in public.
Women who are walking around with a giant upper lift that’s bigger than their lower lip.
They look totally unnatural and it’s obvious that they’ve had treatments.
Quality work never looks like it’s been treated. it simply looks good.
Finally, there having the injection itself.
There are two aspects to consider when having fillers injected.
One of them is discomfort and the other is bruising.
If lip filler injections are not done well then the procedure can be really painful.
The lips are really sensitive.
different providers will use different methods of improving the experience.
This includes icing the lips, using topical anesthetics or injecting local anesthesia prior to injecting the filler.
This last option of injecting lidocaine prior to injecting the filler is not common, but is my preferred method.
I found that injecting lidocaine using a very, very small long needle is almost painless if we first apply topical anesthetic, and then inject the local anesthetic very very slowly.
The advantage to injecting local anesthetic in the lips prior to injecting fillers are twofold.
The first advantage is that injecting the filler has no pain.
This allows the patient to sit still and be relaxed.
This also allows the provider to take their time and inject multiple times adding small amounts with each pass. I usually let my patient take a look after each pass, giving me feedback if they like the volume.
The lips will be a little larger because of the local anesthetic, but it can be helpful to get feedback from the patient through the procedure.
When the patient is squirming and bleeding it’s more difficult to inject filler with technical precision.
The second advantage to injecting local anesthetic prior to injecting the filler is that we can add a drug called epinephrine to the lidocaine.
I personally mix my own local anesthetic and use a fairly high concentration of epinephrine.
My concentration is 1 to 20,000 which is about five times more epinephrine than comes in premixed solutions.
by using higher concentrations, my patients have good vaso constriction, which causes them to have virtually no bleeding during the treatment. The vasoconstriction causes the lips to temporarily blanch because there’s no blood flowing to them. The use of epinephrine is totally safe and can help significantly.
If there’s no bleeding, then there can’t be bruising.
Bruising is the manifestation hemoglobin from ruptured red blood cells in the tissues.
Patients can be left bruised for weeks after this treatment and this risk can be minimized to the chance of being close to zero.
It’s unlikely you’ll find a provider who wants to inject lidocaine prior to injecting fillers but in my personal experience if done correctly, it has so many advantages.
Finally, the choice of needles used for the injection is really important.
The needles that come with the filler are not sufficiently long to treat lip augmentation with a single injection.
The needle that come with the fillers are only 3/4 of an inch long to inject the length of the lip from the corner of the mouth to the midline requires a needle That’s one and a half inches long.
I don’t recommend telling providers how to do their procedures.
It’s unlike you will find somebody who uses my technique and perhaps sharing my technique isn’t really helpful because of that reason.
I do recommend that you ask providers to show you lots of before and after pictures before having The treatment.
Make sure the results look natural and that the providers maintain the same upper lower lip volume ratio.
It’s not normal to have an upper lip that’s bigger than the lower lip so don’t have treatments if that’s what the results look like.
Making the upper lip bigger than the lower lip common reason for patient to have bad outcomes in my opinion.
I always maintain a natural ratio between the upper and lower lip and this means I inject more volume in the lower lip since it’s bigger and needs to remain bigger.
There are some people whose upper lip and lower lip are almost equal in size, but for most people, the lower lip is larger than the upper lip.
For those individuals who have really small upper lips, it’s important to recognize. You can only have a very conservative augmentation in order to look natural.
If you have small Lips then you should ask for a very conservative treatment if you want to avoid having “duck lips”
Variables like wiping your mouth after dinner are irrelevant.
There are a lot of variables that are really important and most of them have to do with provider selection and how they do the treatment.
Finding the right provider is much more difficult than most people realize.
Reading reviews isn’t really going to tell you if the patient induces a significant amount of pain or if they use good techniques to minimize bruising.
Most providers expect you to have the treatment on the same day as consultations.
If you can at all, ask to see before and after pictures before you schedule the appointment, it may help scare you Towards the right provider, which in the end is the most important variable.
PThis was probably much more than you needed to know.
My apologies about potential grammatical errors, and the rambling nature of my response.
My response was dictated using word recognition.
Lip augmentation when done well has a very high patient satisfaction.
It can look very natural and in improve aesthetic quality substantially.
With all treatments provider selection is the key.
Don’t book for discounts or Groupon or anything like that.
Don’t think that all providers are created equally.
Do everything you can to find the very best provider in your community regardless of cost.
Good luck,
Mats Hagstrom MD