Smoker’s lines are those obvious vertical lines on the upper lip of people who’ve smoked for many years. Sometimes, we even see them to a lesser extent on people who haven’t even smoked, just people who repeatedly over-used the muscle of their upper lip. Besides the obvious cosmetic defect that any line on your face represents, in woman with smokers’ lines who use lipstick, to add insult to injury, the lipstick often bleeds up into those lines. Once you have smokers’ lines, even you’ve stopped smoking, they’re permanent and they don’t go away. So, what can we do to help repair smokers’ lines? There are two temporary ways we treat them, and one permanent way. The temporary way consists of, surprise!, Botox and fillers. Botox to weaken, not to paralyze the muscle, but just to weaken it so that you make the lines less deeply when you talk, and filler can help restore the volume that has been destroyed, and just to improve the overall condition, combined with the Botox. That treatment will last 3-6 months and makes a significant improvement, but does not make them go away completely. If you want to make them go away completely, or you want a permanent improvement, then you need laser treatments, and those lasers work by stimulating your own skin to make new collagen in the middle layer of the skin, in the dermis. Some of those lasers have no down time associated with them, like Fraxel, but give you a medium improvement. And some of the lasers, which are ablative lasers actually cause a week of down time where the upper layer of skin may be removed, but you get a much more meaningful improvement, and again that is permanent. So, there is a way to help smokers’ lines, but smokers’ lines in my opinion just represents one more good reason to remind you why you shouldn’t smoke.
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