Valentine Mouth Rejuvenation

The mouth is one of the most important aesthetic units of the face. Along with the eyes, it is one of the primary foci of human communication. It has the power to override eye messages, and owns the dominant role in broadcasting the disposition. Due to abundance of fillers on the market, as well as doctors lacking the aesthetic touch, one sees a multitude of what is commonly referred to as “duck lips”. The sad thing is, many patients seem to think their lips look good and sadder still, their surgeons do too. Problems cannot be fixed if neither patient nor surgeon is able to see them as such.

The basic mistake many surgeons make is to focus excessively on lip volume, hoping that in making the lips bigger, they would fix all the age-related issues in the mouth area. Injecting fillers in a lip, particularly the aging lip (30 years or older), is like inserting an implant in a saggy breast. The lip may be bigger but not prettier. What happens when the lip ages along with rest of the face? It doesn’t just get smaller, it also loses its natural curves and shape. With age the corners of the mouth start turning downward, resulting in a sad, grumpy look.

The upper lip also elongates with age and the distance between the base of the nose to the lip border increases. Because of this, the lip literally disappears inside the mouth as does the vermilion border. Skin quality around the mouth also changes with age, and vertical lip lines start showing even in people who are not smokers. The end result is elongated, thin lips with no definition, downturned mouth corners and multiple vertical smoke lines on the upper lips.

We have already established that trying to correct the aging mouth with fillers alone creates an additional problem. If a surgeon is not entirely comfortable with addressing each component of aging mouth, he should avoid trying to correct it, so there won’t ever be patients with lips like that.

Valentine mouth rejuvenation is an easy, office based procedure, performed under local anaesthesia only, and it addresses every single component of the aging mouth. Valentine mouth rejuvenation consists of lip lift (corner of the mouth lift, upper lip shortening or both), injection of soft tissue filler (to the lip lines and vermilion border only), and peri-oral CO2 laser resurfacing of the skin of the mouth.

A small lop-sided heart shape skin is removed from the corner of the lip and when the skin is sutured, the negative line becomes a positive one.

Figure: Valentine procedure. A lop sided heart shape skin is removed from the corner of the mouth, and when the defect is closed, the downturned corners are corrected, and the sad/negative line is converted to a happy/positive one.

If the upper lip is thin due to elongation, an upper lip shortening is performed, and the natural volume of the lip is restored by shortening the distance between the base of the nose and the lip line.

Soft tissue fillers are only used to redefine the vermilion borders, the cupid’s bow, and the philtral columns (the vertical groove in the middle area of the upper lip). Essentially no filler is injected into the lip itself, thus avoiding unnatural results.

The vertical smoke lines are addresses by CO2 laser resurfacing, not by pumping up the lips with fillers.
Figure: CO2 laser resurfacing of the skin around the mouth

The end result is naturally full, well defined, sexy lips. See several before and after results of Valentine Mouth Rejuvenation procedure.

The Valentine Procedure is not advised for surgeons who lack extensive experience/background in aesthetic surgery. After all, I, as a plastic surgeon, would not make a good brain surgeon for the same reasons.

The ready availability of a syringe of a soft tissue filler to general medicine doctors, dentists, or dermatologists, does not mean that they should be offering lip rejuvenation, if the goal is to create youthful, attractive, and most importantly, natural lips.