Buffalo Horn Lip Lifts can Improve Your Lips Appearance by Dr. Philip Young of Bellevue | Seattle:
The Buffalo Horn Lip Lift is a lift that entails incising under the nose with corresponding excision of skin and possibly muscle to reduce the distance from the bottom of the nose to the upper lip. Other names for this lip lift are Gull Wing Lip Lift or Under the Nose Lip Lift. The question is when do we need to do this as opposed to other procedures. Other procedures you can do our corner of the lip lifts, fat injections in the lips, silicone implants to the lips (Permalip), V-Y mucosal advancements, Temporary fillers to the lips. What is the ideal lip in terms of aesthetics is a great question to start answering this. The upper lip from the front should be about half the height of the lower lip. The puckering of the lower lip should exaggerate a highlight that is 3 iris widths wide or the same distance of the width of the eyes to emphasize the association with the eyes. I discussses facial aesthetics in my award winning facial beauty theory here: Theory on Facial Beauty. The puckering of the upper lip should be centered in the middle and should be one iris widths wide and 1/2 an iris width high. The height of the lower lip should be one iris width in height. The distance from the bottom of the nose to the upper lip border should be one iris width. Other points of beauty should be that the teeth with the lip resting open should show at least 3mm of upper teeth and the lower teeth should not be visible much at all. The upper lip should also protrude anteriorly beyond the lower lip by 1-2 mm. When you look at beautiful models you will see something interesting. All of the light that hits the lips is mostly concentrated on the lower lip. The lower lip is the center of attention when you look at someone and not the upper lips. So you never want to make the upper lip the same size as the lower lip or this balance will be disrupted. Based on these fundamentals of how the lip should look you can do one or a combination of the above procedures to achieve these ideals. If the distance from the nose to the lip is greater than an iris width you can do a buffalo horn lip lift to shorten the distance. A picture below shows in blue where the excision of skin takes place to shorten this distance. The result of this will cause the upper lip to rise and also will tend to cause the upper lip to show more of the red portion which may or may not be beneficial. If the lips are thin, that is less than 1/2 iris width for the upper and one iris width for the bottom and less than one iris width in puckering in the upper lip and less than 3 iris widths for the highlight puckering in the lower lip you could volumize the lips with fat injections, temporary fillers, or permalip or other silicone permanent lip implant. You can also fill the lips with natural tissue implants from the temple or within the face (during a facelift for example) that can act just like the silicone lip implant. Filling can be done to cause more of the red lip to show. If there still requires more of the lip to show, you can do V-Y advancements to evert the lips more. This is done be advancing the mucose or the lining inside the lips in a way that causes the lip to evert more. You can read about these more here http://www.ayoungyou.com/?cat=15. Corner of the lip lifts do just that and raise the corners. The drawbacks with that are that you need an external incision to lift the corners. If you can accept an external scar this could be a good option. We have other blogs that discuss that too. Fat injections can fill the lips, evert the lips and volumize the whole mouth area to rejuvenate the whole mouth or perioral area.
Thanks for reading, Dr Young
Dr Young specializes in Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washington
