Dermabrasion for removing Lip Wrinkles

Some women, as they age, develop severe wrinkles around their lips. These types of lip and mouth wrinkles are truly insidious. Women who have thin lips, who have smoked, and who have a large, flat distance from their nose to their lip are most prone to the problem. Nowadays, many women are finding that lip injections with temporary fillers such as Restylane or Juvederm are quite useful for filling out the lips, which in turn plumps out the deep vertical lip wrinkles. More drastic measures include getting a major lip lift or lip modification plastic surgery, or permanently filling lips with lip implants or silicon drops. Every cosmetic solution has it’s own inherent risks. For a woman who has a problem with these lip wrinkles, a procedure called dermabrasion can be done which is what we will talk about in this beauty blog article.

Dermabrasion

Dermabrasion is a cosmetic procedure where the surface of the skin is removed by sanding. Not to be confused with a light glycolic peel or skin exfoliation (sometime called micro-dermabrasion) done by an esthetician, dermabrasion is typically performed under anesthesia by a medical doctor such as a cosmetic surgeon. Usually, a stiff wire brush is used to sand away damaged layers of skin. The dermabrasion procedure has been popular among people with deep acne scars for years, but is also often performed by cosmetic surgeons too in order to help cure an over abundance of unsightly lip wrinkles.

Women should know that the perioral dermabrasion I am referring to penetrates skin deeply and requires time to heal. It should not be confused with microdermasion which brushes away only the top epidermal layer with a jet of sand-like crystals. Microdermabration is a lunch time peel with only slight pink discoloration and it is usually performed by an esthetician. Dermabrasion is a real surgical procedure performed by a cosmetic surgeon or expert dermatologist. The two skin procedures are totally different in the extreme.

Healing from Dermabrasion

After the sanding, the skin is extremely raw and red. The redness lasts from two weeks to several months. In the first few weeks the redness is blaringly obvious and looks like a serious skin burn that can hardly be covered with make up. After a few weeks, the burn will tone down as heeling ensues and the red skin can be covered somewhat with make up and you can get out and about using sun screen. A true dermabrasion procedure is very, very disfiguring at first and should not be performed unless a woman has a week or two of free down time to lay low, heel, and avoid going out to much in public or in the sun.

Dermabrasion of Lip and mouth Wrinkles

The best way to avoid unsightly “pursed” lip wrinkles is to avoid the sun and smoking. Smoking weakens skin elasticity and the constant pursing of the lips to puff the cigarette helps the wrinkles formulate around the mouth. Even sans smoking and sun damage, some women have very thin lips coupled with flat skin and facial structure around their lips. Genetics and the structure of the mouth can lead to wrinkles in perfectly healthy women and it’s just a matter of bad luck in terms of how her face ages. Wrinkles around the lips are extremely aging not to mention hard to conceal. So women who become interested in solutions might do several procedures, like get dermabrasion combined with regular Restylane or Collagen injections.

How much does dermabrasion cost?

Lip dermabrasion will typically cost around $1500 dollars and require several weeks time to heal after which make up can be used to camoflauge the treated area until new skin restores. Total healing time is a few months. Your skin is being sanded, so while this can be done with a local anesthetic shot or nova-cane, it is most commonly done while a woman is under some form of twilight sedation or anesthesia, perhaps in conjunction with some other plastic surgery, such as a face lift.

Will dermabrasion get rid of the wrinkles?

Dermabrasion will get rid of some of the wrinkles. Bottom line, it works since we know that it can help sand away pitted acne scars. But dermabrasion only works to a certain depth of the skin. If you have allot of wrinkles, it will help get rid of only the most superficial ones. The deeper grooves really won’t be fixed by dermabrasion because your skin can only really be sanded down by a fraction. Anything deeper than the top skin layers won’t be fixed by dermabrasion. That being said, it can help with the superficial wrinkles and open the door to more easily resolving the deep remaining wrinkles with injectable fillers into the lips and into the remaining wrinkle grooves.

Are you considering dermabrasion?

If you have many wrinkles around the mouth that are driving you crazy, then I would consider getting dermabrasion. What you have to understand is that it is only a very partial solution. Superficial wrinkles will really be helped but it won’t get rid of the deeper wrinkles. It’s a good first stab at the problem. If you have a lot of wrinkles, it makes sense to get rid of whatever you can at the surface. At that point, you can check out the results and decide about getting some fillers.

Dermabrasion complications

Dermabrasion does not come without it’s own set of risks. For one thing, your face will look very clown-like for weeks. If you get this done just around the mouth, you will look utterly ridiculous. If you despise your mouth wrinkles with a passion, then you’re willing to look disfigured for a while to ameliorate the wrinkles in the long term. Secondly, you are damaging the skin and there is never a guarantee about how it will heal. Make sure to go to a well qualified plastic surgeon who has history of having done many of these dermabrasion procedures on the skin surrounding lips, as you don’t want to risk lasting damage to such an important part of your face.

The biggest risk of dermabasion is that the skin will not be the same exact color as the rest of your skin after healing. While you can conceal this with make up, understand that the color of the healed skin could be slightly off. If you have a deep skin cut you don’t know how perfectly the scar will heal. Likewise, you don’t know how the skin will heal with dermbrasion either. If you have olive skin your risk is ever more increased. If you have a darker complexion I would go to a cosmetic doctor that regularly treats dark or olive skin women and is familiar with whether you can even be treated without discoloration risks or not.

Before choosing dermabration make sure you look into other alternatives such as laser removal or chemical peels. Those are definitely alternatives that are potentially less invasive. I personally think dermabration penetrates deepest for a better result but it is not for the faint of heart and it takes a long time to heal from dermabrasion. Before and after pictures are quite amazing, but as I stated it is quite disfiguring to the face initially as you can see in example dermabrasion photos and before and after photographs.

Alternatives to dermabrasion

There are alternatives. You can get a chemical peel such as a TCA peel or a laser peel procedure, or a series of IPL treatments as an alternative to the sanding of dermabrasion. But peels also require skin to heal and sometimes they don’t even penetrate as deep as the dermabrasion would so they might heal faster but be a bit less effective with many of them needed to effect a result.

Facial cosmetic surgery

Women should know that plastic surgery, such as getting a mid-face lift or neck lift, can indirectly help some of the lip wrinkles by virtue of the nearby skin pull. Cosmetic surgery to the face including mid-face lift or a neck lift, to some small extent pulls skin tighter near the outer vicinity of the mouth. Such surgery can indirectly really help resolve at least some of the wrinkles. Wrinkles around the outer left and right vicinity of the mouth in particular are going to be pulled tighter indirectly by virtue of a face or neck lift. However, wrinkles directly between the nose and mouth (the vertical lip line ones that women who have them so despise) aren’t going to be fixed even by a face lift. They have to be treated directly and dermabrasion is a way to do it.

No down time non-surgical alternatives

If you don’t want to go through the skin healing process of dermabrasion yet you do want a quick non-surgical lip wrinkle fix, I’d recommend getting lighter lunchtime peels or home facial peels to keep lip skin exfoliated, combined with lip and line filling injections every few months of Restylane. It costs money but takes no down time to do light peels and skin filler injectables. Stay out of the sun and wear sunscreen, don’t smoke, drink plenty of fluids to keep skin hydrated and moisturize skin to prevent new wrinkles from forming after treatments.