Question: How soon will I heal after a lip lift?
Answer:
This is an excellent question because some people heal very easily and quickly. For other people, it may take a bit longer.
Everyone who has a lip lift will have at least a week of uncomfortable lip swelling. It is a strange feeling – the lip feels stiff and unnatural. Smiling feels odd, and your lip isn’t as flexible when you talk. You need to eat soft food and you feel self-conscious. There may be some bruising.
Sutures come out after 5-7 days. If you can’t return to your surgeon to have the sutures removed, you need to find someone else to remove them. Why can’t absorbing sutures be used on the skin? When the white lip is sutured with absorbing sutures, healing is slower and the scar stays red for much longer.
For many people, after a week, things have settled down, although there is still some swelling.
For other people, the lip may feel tight and uncomfortable and look noticeably swollen for another week or so.
During the first 6 weeks after a lip lift, you need to conceal the incision with make-up. The incision will be firm, pink or red, and often looks quite irregular. Things improve a lot after 6 weeks. By six months for almost everyone, the scar is a faint line at the base of the nose and sometimes is invisible.
I have had a few recent lip lift patients who didn’t heal as expected – their bodies rejected the internal support sutures I have always used for lip lifts. This delayed their healing for weeks. Yet these internal sutures are the latest, most expensive sutures, designed to dissolve at exactly 6 weeks when the scar has its maximum strength. They are excellent sutures and I have not seen similar reactions in other areas of the face. So it is a reaction that I cannot explain but it has convinced me that for easy healing after a lip lift, be sure that your surgeon does not use internal support sutures.
This is truly a lovely little operation that can make a big difference. Watch in this video as Dr. Morgan explains lip lifts and all you need to know about the procedure.
https://vimeo.com/145666873