Dr. Susan Lark's Menopause Relief Blog

While I like to believe that lip lines (or wrinkles around the lips) are a distinctive part of a woman’s beauty, I certainly understand that it can be upsetting to see those fine lines around your lips. If your lip lines are bothering you, I encourage you to try what complementary dermatologists call combination therapy, which is based on two facts: 1) A woman’s skin rebuilds itself constantly, and 2) The aging of a woman’s face results from a multitude of factors, each requiring a different therapeutic approach. By combining gentle therapies that target the different processes that cause lip lines, you can significantly reduce those lines without side effects, exorbitant cost, or the need to hide for weeks while you heal from painful cosmetic procedures. Better yet, the effects are cumulative over time. 

Step 1 for Wrinkle Free Skin Around the Lips: Relax Your Lips
Skin, like bone, reshapes itself according to the forces that it is chronically exposed to. The predominant force that shapes your lips is the orbicularis oris muscle, which forms a pursestring-like ring around your mouth. Contracting this muscle causes your lips to “purse” and pulls the surrounding skin into radiating folds. With repetition, the folding creates creases in the skin’s deeper layers. This causes new layers of skin to accommodate and deepen that crease. Sucking on a cigarette, drinking straw, or similar object encourages this process. In conventional dermatology, Botox injections paralyze the culprit muscle fibers, but the same result can be had by simply not smoking or using drinking straws, and by not engaging in similar actions that contract the orbicularis oris muscle.