It’s time to deflate the duck lips: Fillers are out say docs

For a decade, lips have been getting bigger. Reality stars, influencers and even Apprentice wannabes, if rumours are to be believed, have used injected fillers to inflate theirs.

But it seems we may finally have reached peak pout — and, thank goodness, the only way is down.

The biggest trend in tweakments is for women to have their fillers dissolved to undo the swollen, bumpy look of over-filled lips and give back a more natural smile.

What used to be a hush-hush procedure — because it meant you’d had too much filler or it had been put in badly — has even become a common boast among celebrities.

Love Island’s Molly-Mae Hague, a runner-up in 2019, caused a sensation when she talked openly about reducing her lips the next year.

Geordie Shore’s Holly Hagan has since done the same, as have Gemma Collins and Megan McKenna from The Only Way Is Essex. And just before Christmas, Charlotte Crosby, also of Geordie Shore fame, sported a bruised but noticeably thinner smile too.

Out in the real world, practitioners tell me they’re seeing more and more women asking to have lip filler dissolved.

Samira Kaur is one young woman rejecting the pneumatic look after five years of using fillers. “In pictures, I looked OK,” says the 27-year-old eyelash artist from North-West London. “But when I saw videos of myself talking, my lips were sticking out with that duck-like look. A lot of people think that’s what filler is supposed to look like, but I know it’s not.”

Samira first had filler when she was 22, from a practitioner she found on Instagram who had no medical qualifications.

“I wasn’t insecure about my lips when growing up,” she says. “But the more time I spent on social media, the more it felt like everyone was getting something done. Suddenly, I was convinced my lips were too small and that having filler would make me more attractive, so I caved.”

Yet five years on, Samira was left feeling unhappy with her lips, which had become lopsided. Her injector simply suggested adding more filler to “even them out”. Samira decided she couldn’t keep injecting more in her quest for the perfect pout.

She contacted Steven Harris, an aesthetic doctor who speaks out against the overuse of fillers. “The problem with lips is that they’re often looked at in isolation,” he says. “People want the treatment, but it may not match their other features, so it stands out in a bad way, especially if it is botched.”

For several years, Dr Harris has run a weekly “dissolving clinic” at his practice in Crouch End, North London — but now he finds himself devoting 25 per cent of his time every day to “normalising” messed-up lips. He says: “The tide is turning and people are looking for more subtle and more natural-looking results.”

He dissolved Samira’s filler by injecting her lips with a substance called hyaluronidase. This powerful enzyme dissolves filler gels made from hyaluronic acid almost instantly. At Dr Harris’s clinic, the treatment costs $519.

Hyaluronidase is only available on prescription, which means under-skilled, non-medical injectors, who don’t hold a prescribing qualification, can’t get hold of it. Initially, Samira wanted Dr Harris to re-inject filler in a way that would look more natural. But he talked her out of it, saying her lips were lovely as they were. She’s now relieved she took his advice: “I can see now that having lip filler didn’t make me look better. Natural lips are definitely coming back.”

Dr Catherine Fairris, President of the British College of Aesthetic Medicine (BCAM), says the over-inflated look is out of control.

“We have all seen unflattering and grossly abnormal-looking lip filler,” she says. “Achieving natural-looking, subtle results takes skill and expertise, which many practitioners out there don’t have, as well as an understanding of the way dermal fillers behave in the skin.”

It’s not simple to undo years of botched filler. Dr Fairris warns that using hyaluronidase to dissolve gels carries its own risk: “Anaphylaxis — a potentially fatal allergic reaction — is a side-effect of hyaluronidase treatment. So, seeking the input of a medically qualified and experienced aesthetic practitioner is important.”

An added complication is that few patients ask their injector exactly what is being put into their lips — and there are around 200 brands of filler available. A handful of these have immaculate pedigrees and years of rigorous testing behind them, but the rest don’t. So they may or may not dissolve in the way they should.

A further problem is that filler very often doesn’t stay where it is put. Most people think it breaks down and disappears after six months, at which point they have more injected. But often, dermal fillers last a lot longer. Indeed, sometimes when people think their filler has “gone”, it has actually “migrated” — drifted into the skin around the lip border.

Dr Ayah Siddiqi, an advanced aesthetic practitioner with clinics in Halifax and London, sighs when I ask her about lip filler dissolving. “I now spend 90 per cent of my time dissolving lip fillers. The real problem is with product migration. Because of the way the muscles around the mouth move, filler migrates almost 100 per cent of the time.” As she points out, the lips are like two tubes and the filler placed there is constantly squeezed by movements of the mouth.

“A lot of people try to give lips a different shape, which works at first, but with time and repetitive movement, the filler will move.”