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September 3, 2025 12 mins
Are lip lifts the secret to youthful, fuller lips—or a risky shortcut to social-media perfection?

In this episode of Plastic Surgery Uncensored, Dr. Rady Rahban pulls back the curtain on one of the most talked-about procedures trending today: the lip lift. He dissects the pros, cons, and everything you need to know before considering this permanent alternative to fillers. What exactly makes a lip lift different from injections? Who are the ideal candidates—and why should younger patients chasing the “Cupid’s bow” trend think twice? From scar placement to the recovery process, Dr. Rahban breaks down the delicate technique, the importance of dissolving fillers beforehand, and the real risks of turning a temporary enhancement into a lifelong alteration. Whether you’re a mature candidate seeking natural rejuvenation or simply curious about the hype, this episode challenges you to ask: are you ready for a permanent change, or are you looking for a short-term fix? With his trademark candor and patient-advocate approach, Dr. Rahban gives you the insight you won’t find on Instagram—helping you make an informed decision before it’s too late. 

👉 Subscribe, rate, and share this episode of Plastic Surgery Uncensored. Because the best advice might just save you—or a loved one—from results you never intended. 

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✔️ Share this episode with someone considering plastic surgery—the right knowledge can save a life. 🎙️ Plastic Surgery Uncensored: Real talk. Real patients. Real results. 
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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
All right, welcome to another episode of Plastic Surgery on Censored.
I'm your host, doctor Roddy Raban, and today we're going
to just do a straightforward deep dive on liplifts. The
reason is liplifts are super popular. They're all over social media.
You may or may not know they're all over social media.
You may or may not know anything about them. But
they are a double led sword and it's really important
you understand what they really are and what they can

(00:28):
do and how they can go sideways. So I'm gonna
give you everything you need to know about liplifts in
the next twenty minutes or so.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
So number one, what is a liplift? And it is
what it says it is.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
It's lifting the lip, which lift the upper lip, so
essentially it's a facelift of the upper lipt.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
So why on else why would you ever do that?

Speaker 1 (00:46):
So, as we age, usually it's age related, but sometimes
just by your anatomy, the upper lip length, the length
of the upper lip from under the nose to the
cupid's bow on your lip, starts to get longer. If
you look at pictures of let's say a sixteen or
seventeen year old that distance is very short. The lip

(01:08):
swoops outward, it's everted, and it's got a nice curve
to it. If you look at a seventy five or
eighty year old woman or male, that lip length is long.
It's convex, meaning it sort of scoops inwards. The upper
lip sort of disappears.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Into the mouth.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
So obviously, having fuller or more attractive shaped lips is
very desirable. So when we do a liplift, what we're
essentially doing is taking a wedge out from under the
nose and removing the redundancy or the excess of the
upper eyelid, hence shortening the distance and bringing more of

(01:48):
the pink part of the lip up and exposed. So
a lip lift has two purposes. One to shorten the distance,
which in and of itself is attractive. In other words,
we don't really we think about like, big eyes are attractive.
You know, a cute nose is attractive. Well, a short
distance is attractive. You just don't know that because you

(02:09):
never really pay attention to the upper lip length distance.
But there is every single gorgeous person, and predominantly this
is a female related thing has a shorter distance. The
second thing it's designed to do is create more visible
pink lip. That is, make your lip seem larger and
more visible. Now we have obviously people who are doing filler,

(02:31):
and with the advent of filler, it has sort of
it's done different things. When you add filler, you're not
shortening the distance, right, because you're only adding volume to
the lip itself. And in many instances you're making the
lip really big and puffy, and you're making it three dimensional.
In other words, what's happening is when you you know,
very commonly people are like, I hate lip filler. Why

(02:55):
because it makes you look like a duck. And what
they mean is when you turn to your side, lip
looks like it's jutting forward because when you add volume
and you're adding to the lip, it puffs up the lip,
but it does so three dimensionally. So yes, in the
front view you have more pink visible, maybe desirable, as
that's what you're trying to do, But from the side
view it's also moving forward and sort of looks odd.

(03:19):
It's particularly odd in more mature women. So as far
as candidacy is concerned, a lip lift is really was
designed is designed for someone that's a bit more mature
because of several factors. Number One, inherently, their upper lip
length is increasing. Two their upper lip is slowly disappearing

(03:39):
and getting smaller. And three they're not gonna look so
good with filler because it's gonna look a little odd
in a mature woman when you have filler in. Yes
you can do filler incredibly subtly, and yes it can
look natural, but still you're you're not gonna ever look
as good as when that those two other factors are corrected.
So that's where sort of the ideal patient or the

(04:02):
ideal candidate is someone who has aged a bit and
that length is a little bit longer if you have
fillers in already, which often is the case because you
start out with fillers and then you're like, God, I
don't like the filler, or maybe I don't want to
keep doing the filler. If you're going to go towards
doing a liplift, you absolutely want to have that dissolved
because it's going to alter the ultimate outcome or the

(04:25):
endpoint of how much skin you need to remove. Remember
this is permanent. This is a surgery. There's no going back,
there's no reversing it. So it's very very important that
we be accurate, and hence you want to make sure
that you reverse any filler that's in there. As far
as scars are concerned, scars, where are the scars? So
this is really really important. You want to make sure

(04:47):
that the scars are concealed. Like if we do an
upper eye lid surgery, you're not going to ever know
where that is when it's done correctly. When we do
a face of surgery, it's incredibly concealed. So lip lifts
are so sort of concealed. What do I mean by that?
They're supposed to be placed the pattern it's called a bullhorn.
It looks like the horn of a bull. And it's

(05:08):
placed in the right underneath the nose, into the sill
of the nose, underneath the columella, and back around the.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
Side, so it's right in the crease of your nose.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
Now some people have a naturally sort of invaginated crease.
In other words, it goes inwards, which is perfect because
it hides the scar well. Other people there that area
is very outwards or it's exposed, and so the scar
will be more visible. And so the way the scar
is placed, the way the scar is closed and the
way the scar heals is very very important. I have

(05:42):
seen hundreds of visible scars on patients who come to
me for I don't know, no shop or eyelid or
lip filler or what have you. And frankly, I personally
think that if you do it and you have a
really visible scar, I don't think it's a good trade off.
So it should be done so well well that the
scar heals beautifully and isn't visible.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Now it's a surgery.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Can I do it in the office, Yeah, I can
do it in the office. I can do it under local,
but it's still a surgery. And by that I mean
that it's permanent and there's no reversing it. Like filler
you can reverse. I hate it, it goes away. This
is a surgery and therefore you need to treat it
as such. So it's a probably a thirty minute to
an hour long procedure. It can be done under local

(06:26):
or in the operating room in conjunction with other things.
The recovery is about a week. Of the the sutures
or the stitches that I use have to be removed
around five days, and you kind of kind of look
pretty normal around.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
Four to six weeks.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
Remember you're a little tight and that area relaxes, and
so for a little while it's a little tighter, and
when you smile, it's not as natural looking.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
Now. The main thing, the reason.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
Why I'm having this conversation is because I think the
lip lift is being.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
Way overused, overused.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
The reason being is if you go on Instagram or
social media often you'll see a ton of these so
called models, self touted models, and when you look at
their photos, you're gonna notice that their lips look super
everted and the distance between their nose and their.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Lip is really really short.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
Now, you can make the argument that in photographs they
kind of look attractive. It's a very specific look, but
unfortunately in person, I think they look really weird. And
the problem we're having now is, unlike the candidate I
spoke about, which is an older woman older, I mean,
I don't know, forties, fifties, sixties, twenty year olds are

(07:40):
going to get lip lifts, and they're doing it because
a they don't want to keep doing filler.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Well crap, I'm gonna just.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
Go get a facelift, even though I don't need it,
because I don't want to do X Y and Z.
That doesn't make any sense. So they're doing it a
because they don't want to do filler. Two they're doing
it because they like that sort of Cupid's bowie look
sort of.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
Appearance on their photos.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
So they're going to make themselves look odd in person
in exchange for so called better photos.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
And it is irreversible.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
And in my opinion, doctors should be ashamed of themselves
because if I had a young girl coming to my
office who is let's say, twenty three beautiful girl, very
normal anatomy, meaning the distance from her nose to her
lip was very appropriate, and she wanted a lip lift,
there'd be no way on earth that I do it
because I know that she's going to look a little,
in my opinion, silly or weird, animated or odd. And

(08:36):
even if she's like, oh, I don't care, I like
that look, it doesn't mean that I can help her
with self suicide. So I think that they're just way
being overdone. It became popular, it's a trending thing. Doctors
are really pushing it because it can be done under
local and frankly, I think the scar is something that
you have to trade off, right. You have to be

(08:57):
willing to Oh, Wow, your lip looks so much better.
Oh that little scar, I don't care, but like, if
your lip doesn't look better, it's a big trade off.
And two, I think that it's a very powerful procedure
that can really make you look different if you understand.
In addition, and what's an adjunct is if you understand
what I was describing, we're lifting the middle of your

(09:17):
lip based on the width of your nose. So in
individuals who have the ratio of the width of their
nose to their lip is relatively I don't want to
say similar, but not that far off. A lip lift
can be done in isolation because when you lift the
middle of that area, the majority of the lip willis

(09:37):
become exposed. In individuals who have narrow noses and really
wide mouths, you have to do additional procedures along with
the lip lift in order for the whole lip to
open up. Otherwise, what you're gonna do is you're just
gonna pull the middle of the lip up, and that
looks absolutely bizarre. So imagine I just pull the middle
of my lip up, but the corners of my mouth

(10:00):
stay where they are. Well, then that's going to look
kind of like rabbit like when you have that anatomy,
then you need corner lip lifts. That is, the lip
lift plus removal of skin on the corner, so that
in totality, the entire lip everts and you see more
of the pink of the lip universally across rather than

(10:22):
most of it in the middle and not so much
in the corners. So adjuncts to it are going to
be central liplift in addition to plus or minus corner
lip lifts, And that's very important for you and your
surgeon to discuss. So do I like liplifts, Yes, but
in the right patient. I think, in the right patient
super powerful. And it's very commonly added during a facelift

(10:45):
or other facial rejuvenation because generally, if you're getting a facelift, right,
you're usually in your fifties, right, late forties, early fifties
and sixties. And yes, at that point, in addition to
the sagging brows and the eye lid skin and this
that the other your lip has extended. But I think
you need to be incredibly cautious if you're a young
girl and you're thinking of a lip lift as an

(11:09):
alternative to lift filler, because it's like highlighting your hair
versus shaving your head. They have nothing to do with
each other as far as I'm concerned. So that's essentially
the skinny on lip lifts. So I hope that's helpful,
and yeah, we'll see you next week on Plastic Surgery

(11:30):
and Censored. As always, two things before I end this
one is go write us a positive review.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
We love it.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
Everybody gets so excited when somebody writes something nice and
the other share this episode and all our episodes the
people you love, because the last thing they want to
do is come home one day and see a good
friend of yours with some bizarre lip, find out they
had a liplift, and say, God, damn it, I should
have sent you that episode. They're not gonna tell you
before it happens, So send all our episodes out and
we'll see you next week on Plastic Surgery and Censored
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