Tweakments to face up to outdoor days of summer...
Loving your face mask as you finally have something to hide those lines and wrinkles? Never fear, after all those Zoom calls, beauty expert INGE VAN LOTRINGEN has the ultimate makeover
NOT everyone, it’s fair to say, is raring to whip off their mask. Safety fears aside, there may be once-hidden blemishes to be concealed, jawlines to be blitzed with a facial roller, and if you have thinner lips than you’d like, the daily challenge of plumping your pout.
After months under wraps, many of us want a bit of help. New research has shown a postlockdown lift of 160 per cent in bookings for non-surgical interventions. Two tweakments caught my eye — a smile-perfecting lip flip that takes ten minutes and a mono-threading treatment loved by actress Eva Mendes.
The Lip Flip involves administering a wrinkle-relaxing toxin such as Botox to the upper-lip area. (Depending on your mouth, the lower lip is sometimes injected as well.)
‘Cancelling out some of the muscle activity makes the lip “curl out” slightly, making it look fuller,’ says nurse prescriber Teresa Rocha, who administers mine. ‘Think of it as a lip-plumping treatment without the lip fillers.’
Not only is it one of the most natural-looking lip-boosting treatments, it’s also the most cost-effective: starting at €120, it’s a major saving on the €380 starting price for lip fillers.
So what does it take to get a flipped-out smile? It’s simple: four Botox injections in my top-lip line, two each side of my cupid’s bow.
‘Points of injection and the number of jabs depend on each individual’s anatomy, as does the amount of toxin used,’ says Teresa. In other words, the technique is subtly personalised to your lip shape. This means it’s essential you choose a qualified, experienced and medically trained practitioner with a thorough grasp of facial anatomy who can show plenty of examples of their work.
Unlike fillers, botulinum toxin can’t be dissolved if anything goes wrong or you don’t like the result. So if you choose a cowboy practitioner, you could be left with odd lips for the two to three months this relatively small amount of toxin takes to wear off.
Those jabs, by the way, sting. My Covid vaccine was a walk in the park in comparison, but lips do have more than their share of nerve endings.
I could have had numbing cream if I’d thought to ask, but the procedure is so quick (you can be out in ten minutes) it’s hardly worth the halfhour wait. My lip flip is subtle: Teresa used the minimum amount of Botox (one unit for each jab) which, she says, can be increased on follow-up.
There is the slightest protrusion of my upper lip, making it look fuller and poutier, and my smile is less gummy (you know, like a donkey). I’m pleased when I look in the mirror — but my husband isn’t noticing. And that’s just the kind of ‘tweak’ I like.
With my lips perfected, I focus on my jawline. It’s a dark morning when you find yourself looking in the mirror while pulling your jawline taut with two fingers. Zoom doesn’t help — its default way of capturing us being from below. Anyone over 45 who looks down on their phone while filming their face has the right to scream ‘who’s that?!’ and fling their handset at the wall, as far as I’m concerned.
If it makes you Google ‘facial exercises’, I don’t blame you. But I know those won’t work. As years pass, the face’s fat pads and skin-densifying collagen melt, while bone retrusion chips at the scaffolding of your visage. It all leads to droopiness that needs intervention not available in a jar.
AFTER a year blighted by Covid, I’ve been finding myself absent-mindedly stroking the skin under my chin too often, finding it loose. So my interest was piqued when the goddess-like Eva Mendes, 47, between lockdowns posted a picture of herself with huge needles in her neck. I could tell she was tackling the vexing ‘lowerface-and-neck area’, but how?
Having had an eye on my slowlybut-steadily developing jowls for a while, I know there’s no shortage of clinical options to firm up the area. High-intensity focused ultrasound machines, including the gold-standard Ultherapy, enjoy a good reputation for face-tightening. Combined microneedling and radiofrequency devices such as the Morpheus8 (of Judy Murray fame), INTRAcel and Profound have also proved effective.
The problem is, both ultrasound and radiofrequency energy can ‘melt’ fat under the skin, so there is a small risk of unintended fat erosion, which is often just the thing for sculpting fuller faces. But it’s definitely not what a narrow one like mine needs: I want all the volume I can get.
In her Instagram post, Eva was having PDO mono threads, which firm up the area without the loss of volume. ‘These are threads made of polydioxanone, a surgical polymer that gets absorbed over six months,’ aesthetic practitioner Dr Sophie Shotter (drsophieshotter.com) tells me. ‘They’re injected under the skin, to stimulate collagen production for up to two years — even after they’ve dissolved.’
UNLIKE a ‘thread lift’, where bigger, barbed sutures of the same material are implanted and anchored deeply, then tightened to hoist tissues, mono threads ‘won’t necessarily lift, but will firm’, says Dr Shotter. ‘We inject them in a grid pattern in areas prone to losing tone. The neck area, which Eva chose, is a prime candidate. But the beginnings of floppy jowls can be stopped in their tracks with mono threads as well.’
It sounds very clever, but I don’t relish the prospect of bruises all over my face. Every thread requires its own needle and injection, so that’s a lot of jabs in an area rich in blood vessels.
Of course, getting parts of your face sewn up can’t be painless, so I’m glad my appointment starts with an application of numbing cream and a half-hour wait to let the stuff kick in.
Face anesthetised, Dr Shotter inserts ten threads along and across the jawline. She slides long needles under the skin, through which single threads are fed. The needles are then pulled out and bits of thread dangle out of my face like Frankenstein, until Dr Shotter kindly cuts them.
It’s pain-free, thanks to the numbing cream — except for the times when the needles hit a spot the cream hasn’t reached, and then it stings.
The jaw threads ought to take care of my mini-jowls, but for good measure Dr Shotter throws in 40 (40!) needles under my chin and in my neck to stave off any waddles. I can’t feel the neck jabs, which is a bonus. There’s a few drops of blood, but that’s the extent of it. The process, including the wait, takes 45 minutes.
I expect to see a battered face in the mirror, but apart from two bruised vertical lines on my cheek, all looks fairly normal.
It will take five weeks before any firming effects from the turbocharged collagen production become visible. My jawline feels tender and Dr Shotter warns me some more bruises may materialise the next day. But I won’t have to forego exercise or sleeping on my face.
That would be the case with a thread lift (re-popularised by an article on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website), where too much pressure could make the sutures snap and cause the facial tissues to drop back. Eek!
So, again, it’s important to make sure your practitioner has medical qualifications and a demonstrable track record of doing the procedure.
I spend the rest of the day feeling fine apart from a sore spot near my earlobe, but when I cleanse my face in the evening, my jawline feels like it’s gone six rounds with Mike Tyson. I’ve also developed a bruise on my chin, and under it there is a spot that stings when I touch it: it feels like the end of a thread sits right there, needling my nerve endings.
A few more stingy spots crop up in the next few days and jab me on and
off — a reminder I’ve got a face shot full of fishing lines.
The bruised feeling does subside, slowly; it takes a week to disappear. The purple face lines scare the delivery drivers at my door for about a fortnight, too.
But three months on, there is an added density to the skin around my jaw, which is normally so loose I can pull it like gum. Looking down still makes me swear, but I can see an incremental tautening of dangling flesh.
The results aren’t spectacular, but they aren’t meant to be. PDO threads are a way of subtly resupplying skin with the collagen cells it’s losing, so they basically halt the slide for a year or so. Like the subtle Lip Flip, that’s the kind of under-the-radar ‘ageing gracefully’ technique I can get on with.
■ The Lip Flip is €140 at Anne Hegarty cosmetic clinic, see annehegartycosmeticcare.ie;
■ PDO Mono Threads start from €500 at Derma Clinic, see dermaclinic.ie
■ Great Skin: Secrets The Beauty Industry Doesn’t Tell You by Ingeborg van Lotringen €15, Gibson Square)