Your Questions
Your Questions
Q: Dr. Eppley, I would like to reduce the length of my upper lip. I have attached two pictures, which although low in quality (web cam shots), illustrate my concerns. My upper lip is too strong for my face – dominant, long and protruding, with considerable vermilion show. The distance between the root of my nose and the pink park of my upper lip is 18 mm. If I’m aiming for a 14 cm distance, does this mean you will need to remove only 4 mm of skin? Or does the skin incision has to be greater than that to achieve a shortening of the upper lip of 4 mm? My other concern is that as a man I don’t my lip pout to increase from doing this procedure.
A: To reduce an 18mm philtral lip height to 14mms using a subnasal lip lift technique, you need to remove just 4mms. But without question that will cause some increased lip pout. By definition, a subnasal lip lift causes increased vermilion show. That will settle down over a few months but may or may not return to what it was before the lip lift. That is why you can either do it in two staged of 2 -3 mms each or do a 4mm skin exicison with an internal mucosal roll of the upper lip. You do have a lot of vermilion so I don’t think this will give you excessive tooth show. If you do the two together (subnasal lip lift and horizontal mucosal excision, you may want to do that under some IV sedation with local injections)
Dr. Barry Eppley
Indianapolis, Indiana
Q: I am a 43 year-old male who is bothered by my long upper lip. When I smile I show no teeth and this makes me look older in my opinion. In addition, I have almost no red part of my line, it is just like a thin pencil line. I have done some reading and it seems a lip lift work. My measured vertical distance between the base of my nose and the top of the red part of my lip is 23mms. I have not read anywhere or seen that a man has had this type of lip shortening. Can it be done in a male? I have attached a front photo of myself for you to see what my lip looks like.
A:Thank you for sending your facial photo. While it is not a completely closed mouth view, it does show how long your upper lip is. You are correct in assuming that the only option for shortening your upper lip is a subnasal lip lift. As a general rule, I remove about 1/3 of the natural philtral distance. Since you are at 23mms, you could remove about 6 to 7 mms without any difficulty… maybe more. Whether this will be enough to unmask your teeth in smiling is to be seen but, at the least, the upper lip will be centrally shorter. The subnasal lip lift does not shorten or reduce the sides of the lip since the width of the tissue removal is limited to between the nostril bases. The lip near the corners of the mouth will not improve from a subnasal lip lift.
Dr. Barry Eppley
Indianapolis, Indiana