Swelling on One Side of Mouth After Restylane - Normal?

Swelling after injection with the HA fillers is to be expected, and it's commonly more dramatic than patients may be ready for, but it is not worrisome. The kind of late-developing one-sided lump you ended up with sounds like something different. It's possible a blood vessel around the mouth/cheek area was poked, which normally is not a big deal, but sometimes does lead to more bleeding inside the tissue which can form a nodule called a hematoma. This can especially happen if the patient has taken aspirin, ibuprofen, or other blood thinners in the couple of weeks before injection.

See your board-certified dermatologist or plastic surgeon to help figure out what happened and to help fix it.

Swelling with any of the hyaluronic acid products is common. They absorb water. Restylane in particular is hydrophilic, meaning it absorbs water. Immediately after being injected (within the hour) it’s normal for you to have swelling just from the product absorbing water. I always tell people not to be concerned over swelling within the first several days after a hyaluronic product has been injected, particularly in the lips. I would give it at least 2 weeks and let it settle down before seeing the doctor. We usually wait a month before doing any refinement of the procedure. A refinement could be removing product with hyaluronidase or adding more product if there is an area that is under corrected. But don’t be overly concerned. Even the best doctor can have a situation where there’s unevenness and that is not necessarily related to having too much product, it is often the body’s reaction to the product and the result may still turn out to be fine. You don’t want to evaluate the correction before you let all the normal swelling resolve.