Lip Shape & VolumeNewstead, Brisbane

Your lips do more quiet work than most people realise. Because they sit at the centre of your lower face, they shape how your smile, your chin, and the area around your mouth look together, whether you are talking or your face is resting. When we look at your lips, a few things matter. One is how the upper and lower lip relate in size. Another is how crisp the edge of the lip is, the line where the colour of your lip meets the skin around it. We call that the vermilion border. We also look at the shape across the top of your upper lip, the gentle peaks known as the cupid's bow, and the soft groove that runs from there up towards your nose, the philtrum. When all of this sits in proportion, your chin, smile lines, and the rest of your mid-face tend to look settled and balanced. When the lips look thin, flat, or a little uneven, it can quietly pull that balance off, even though nothing around them has actually changed.

Most of what brings people in falls into one of two areas. Sometimes it is simply the lips you were born with. Some people naturally have thinner or flatter lips, or show less of the coloured part when their face is relaxed. The little ridges either side of the philtrum can be soft and undefined, the cupid's bow can be flat, or one side might sit a bit differently from the other. None of that is a problem in itself. Lips come in every shape, and what looks small on one face can look perfectly right on another.

The other thing is change that comes with age. Over the years the bone around the mouth slowly thins, which takes away some of the support behind the lips and stretches the distance between the nose and the top lip a little. The lip itself loses some volume, less of the colour shows, and the lips can start to roll inwards. The cupid's bow softens. Fine vertical lines can appear above the top lip, the ones you might know as lip lines or smoker's lines. The ridges beside the philtrum flatten out, and the corners of the mouth can begin to turn down. Often this happens alongside broader facial volume loss across the mid and lower face, which is why a lot of people across Brisbane start thinking about their lips around the same time as the rest of their face.

It is also worth saying that men's and women's lips are built differently, and that matters for how we assess them. Women's lips tend to show more of the coloured part and have a more defined cupid's bow, and the top lip usually sits slightly ahead of the bottom one when you look from the side. Men's lips are usually flatter, show a little less colour, and sit level with or just behind the lower lip. So the same change can look quite different on a man than on a woman. A good assessment takes that into account, rather than treating every lip the same way.

Our Newstead clinic serves clients across Brisbane, including New Farm, Teneriffe, Fortitude Valley, Hamilton, Ascot, and the broader inner north.