Lip augmentation is a very common procedure with many options to plump up your lips. And even though it’s a relatively easy procedure, the most common concern is that you’ll end up with duck lips. Why does that happen? Can’t a person recognize they’ve had too much filler or able to avoid that appearance in the first place?
Do patients actually want duck lips?!
I don’t believe patients want duck lips. They end up with the overly filled augmented “lip look” because they lose perspective. Perspective of their baseline. Here’s what I mean.
A patient goes in to see their doctor because they’re unhappy with the appearance of their lips. Maybe they want a fuller upper or lower, or more typically, fuller upper and lower lips. They get a syringe injection and look great. But then they get used to that appearance over the next 6 to 12 months. As the filler dissolves, they notice their lip volume is decreasing.
However, the situation begs the question: Are their lips really smaller or maybe they’ve become used to their appearance and don’t recognize how the lips are larger than what they started with. So they go back to their doctor and ask for more. The problem is they’re no longer volumizing their lips in step-wise fashion from their original state. They now have a newly “recalibrated” baseline and their perspective is altered.
In other words, if the patient’s original baseline is assigned the value of zero, their first injection took them to a 1. As they become accustomed to this new appearance, that 1 recedes back to a zero in their mind. When they go back and get more filler they think they’re again going from a zero to a 1 when in fact they’re going from a 1 to a 2. After treatment, the ‘2’ becomes their new zero, so when they go back in to get additional filler, the injection brings them up to a 3 and now they have duck lips! Hopefully this numeric analogy makes sense.
Lip Augmentation with Filler Video
The best way to avoid this problem is by documenting your baseline with a photo before the first treatment. When you return for your second treatment, review that baseline photo with your doctor before getting a 2nd treatment. Maybe you only need a small touchup, but not the whole syringe. Regardless, you now have the correct perspective, thereby walking out of the office without those enigmatic duck lips!
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