What is a Lip Lift and Why Does the Plastic Surgery Trend Look So Weird?

There’s never been a time in history where thin lips have been at the forefront of fashion. Whether it’s through dramatic over-lining or the insertion of fillers, we (almost exclusively women) have been encouraged to go bigger. But there’s only so much that injectables can do, especially if you, like me, were born without a top lip. You can only plump up your existing pair so much before things go horribly wrong. So, how do you expand your facial real estate to maximise your pout? Enter the lip lift.

Before we get to that, let’s explain another similar and less invasive procedure. A lip flip is a non-surgical procedure that allows you to modify the shape of your lips through Botox and hyaluronic acid fillers. It usually involves injecting into the border of your lips to relax the underlying muscles and help to shift their shape into something with bigger volume. It’s usually used to make one’s lips bigger but it can also be done to make them more symmetrical.

By contrast, a lip lift is a full-on operation, one that can take between one to two hours and requires general anaesthetic. It’s designed to lessen the space between the bottom of your nose and the top of your lip, therefore making your mouth seem more pronounced and youthful. There are different kinds of lip lifts available, some more drastic than others, but they’re all invasive and require an extremely delicate hand.

The lip lift has grown in popularity over the past few years as lip filler (these are starting to feel like tongue twisters) faces a growing backlash. We’re all too familiar with instances of people who went too big or had unfortunate reactions or started to look, well, weird. Blatantly augmented lips are now so commonplace that it doesn’t seem all that surprising when we pass someone in the street whose kiss enters the room a second before the rest of their face. You can get fillers done on your lunch break at your local shopping centre. Everyone does it. Maybe that’s the problem. Once a trend saturates the market, its exclusivity vanishes and we move onto the next fad. Who wants to end up with lips like Karoline Leavitt?

Because lip fillers are easily overdone and now associated with a kind of beauty that isn’t special, more invasive and “subtle” procedures are filling in the gap. The lip lift is meant to be better, more permanent, and with less upkeep. You don’t have to go back to reinflate things every few months or so and risk filler migration. But, as with any form of cosmetic surgery, there are risks. L. Mike Nayak, MD, a double board-certified facial plastic surgeon noted on Instagram, via Allure, that lip surgeries carry a high rate of visible scarring, especially if you’re under 40. He said that these surgeries have the potential to “make people look very stylized.” That’s what we’ve seen seeing a lot of lately: women with uncanny lips that look doll-like in shape and disproportionate in size. Elevating the upper lip can reveal more of your teeth, which some claim gives a more youthful look. If done poorly, you can end up with dented lips or a wobbly smile that never fully goes away.

Every cosmetic surgery trend feels more horrifying than the last, to me. It’s an endless cavalcade of slicing and dicing, needling and plumping, designed to perennially move the goalposts of already nightmarish beauty standards. Stuff like this has, alas, existed for a long time, but in the current era of brainrot and always-online advertising to the masses, the cycle of trends and body-shaming has increased to a terrifying pace. There are certain rigid standards in place - skinniness, whiteness but with appropriated standards from Black and brown women, small noses, and, yes, big lips - but around that model are endless alterations that offer new and ever-more questionable trends. Remember buccal fat removal, which left so many people looking gaunt and prematurely aged? Or when deliberately fake looking breast implants were all the rage? How about fox eyes or knee lipo or jaw implants? There is always something wrong with us and a helpful array of sponcon offering surgeons with quick fixes on standby.

The lip lift is no more or less corrosive than many of these other trends, I suppose. But it does feel, at least to me, like a particularly obvious instance of a beauty fad whose risks far outweigh the benefits. One surgeon told Allure that, as demand for lip surgeries grew, many in his field “started offering it to patients without really understanding the nuances,” and the results were “a lot of f*ck-ups.” We’re talking prominent scars, misshapen and unbalanced lips, distorted nostrils, and smiles that look straight-up weird in motion. It’s a particular problem in younger patients, those who are more likely to seek out the procedure whether or not they “need” it. The more popular a procedure becomes, the more likely it is that many will be ill-suited for the op and get it from less adept doctors, and so we end up barraged by endless examples of lip flips “gone wrong”, much in the same way we were when all our favourite celebrities started going overboard with their fillers.

But isn’t that also a problem across the board? How familiar have we gotten with seeing celebrities, those who were already objectively gorgeous, turn up on a red carpet with totally different faces? The endless chase for eternal youth has people getting full face-lifts in their 20s and 30s. “Preventative Botox” is a thing sold to people barely old enough to rent a car. The sad irony is getting that much work done when you’re still pretty wrinkle-free has the unfortunate effect of making you look older. Just check out every Love Island contestant or Mar-a-Lago Face patient for evidence of that. I know this makes me sound incredibly mean, but it’s true: everyone’s just starting to look a little bit weird, and every new surgery trend only serves to exacerbate that. The trends are getting odder and so are our faces. There’s no way this ends well. My fellow thin-lipped girls, let’s ride this one out in peace.