June 2, 2026 • 36 mins
What happens when a split-second accident changes the way you see yourself for more than a decade?
In this episode of Plastic Surgery Uncensored, I sit down with Jasmine, a former Navy service member who spent 11 years living with a traumatic lip deformity after a sports injury involving braces. What began as a seemingly routine injury left her with permanent changes to her lip shape, affecting her confidence, smile, photos, and daily interactions for years.
Together, we explore a topic rarely discussed in plastic surgery: lip reduction and corrective lip reconstruction. While the world is flooded with information about lip fillers and lip augmentation, very few patients know that surgical solutions exist for traumatic lip deformities, scar tissue, and post-injury asymmetries. In this episode, we discuss:
• How lip trauma can permanently alter lip shape
• Why many patients struggle for years to find answers
• The difference between cosmetic enhancement and reconstructive surgery
• The emotional burden of living with a visible facial deformity
• Who may be a candidate for lip reduction surgery
Jasmine's story is a powerful reminder that even a seemingly small physical concern can have a profound impact on confidence, self-image, and quality of life. And sometimes, the right solution is closer than you think.
✨ If you enjoyed this episode of Plastic Surgery Uncensored:
✔️ Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
✔️ Rate & Review—your feedback helps more people find us.
✔️ Follow Dr. Rady Rahban across all platforms for daily insights, behind-the-scenes, and patient education:
In this episode of Plastic Surgery Uncensored, I sit down with Jasmine, a former Navy service member who spent 11 years living with a traumatic lip deformity after a sports injury involving braces. What began as a seemingly routine injury left her with permanent changes to her lip shape, affecting her confidence, smile, photos, and daily interactions for years.
Together, we explore a topic rarely discussed in plastic surgery: lip reduction and corrective lip reconstruction. While the world is flooded with information about lip fillers and lip augmentation, very few patients know that surgical solutions exist for traumatic lip deformities, scar tissue, and post-injury asymmetries. In this episode, we discuss:
• How lip trauma can permanently alter lip shape
• Why many patients struggle for years to find answers
• The difference between cosmetic enhancement and reconstructive surgery
• The emotional burden of living with a visible facial deformity
• Who may be a candidate for lip reduction surgery
Jasmine's story is a powerful reminder that even a seemingly small physical concern can have a profound impact on confidence, self-image, and quality of life. And sometimes, the right solution is closer than you think.
✨ If you enjoyed this episode of Plastic Surgery Uncensored:
✔️ Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
✔️ Rate & Review—your feedback helps more people find us.
✔️ Follow Dr. Rady Rahban across all platforms for daily insights, behind-the-scenes, and patient education:
- Instagram: @drradyrahban
- TikTok: @radyrahbanMD
- YouTube: @Rady Rahban
- Facebook: @Rady Rahban
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to another episode of plastic Surgery on Censored. I'm
your host, Doctor Roddy Raband, and as always, we have
an amazing episode for you. That's because all the episodes
are amazing, but when we have an episode with an
amazing patient, it becomes even better. And we're blessed and
honored to have Jasmine, actually lovely lovely patient of mine,
who has joined us and has been kind enough to
(00:29):
come here, spend time and share her story with us.
And I think it's going to be a really interesting
episode because it's about a subject that we don't talk
about a lot. We don't have a lot of information
about it. As a result, I think when we speak
with Jasmine, she'll also share with you that it was
kind of like I couldn't really I didn't know where
to go, what to do. And the subject matter is
(00:50):
lips and lip reductions. We know a lot about lip enhancements,
lip augmentations, but we don't know a lot about lip reductions.
And I'm going to elaborate what that entails and what
your story is. But we are grateful to have you
and thank you for coming on the show. All Right,
So lips are obviously super important right, they're smack that
(01:13):
in the middle of your face. It's such a huge
part of who we are, what we look like, part
of our attractiveness, our sensualness. It's not like an ear lobe, right,
It's like, aside from the fact that it's just right
here in the center, it's something that we talk with,
we kiss with, it's something that we accentuate to make
it look attractive. And so having something not nice about
(01:37):
your lips causes people a lot of makes them very
self conscious. And so your story goes as follows, right,
so tell me your story and everything's great, and in
twenty fifteen, you're living your life.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
And I had a athletic injury where we was wearing
braces at the time and I was playing volleyball. I
thinka yeah or something like that, regardless of the fact
I somehow my knees ended up in my face some trauma,
but essentially my lip got jammed into my braces. Right,
(02:14):
So once they did the stitches on the inside and out,
I realized that there was a lot of swelling, And
once the swelling went down, I realized that the shape
of the natural shape of my lip was like completely changed.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Right, So there's like this hanging.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
You just suddenly had this sort of like redundant.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Excess, excess skin like fluid. I don't know what it was,
but it was just not normal. It wasn't what I
was used to. Sure, yeah, and it was just something
that I was like having to constantly tell myself It's like, oh,
it's not that bad. And I would ask and people
be like, yeah, I don't notice it.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
But I'm like you.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So at the beginning, you thought to yourself, I just
had trauma on my face, right, And I'm sure everyone
told you it'll get better. It'll get better, yes, right,
But at some point, because this was six eleven years ago,
at some point you realize this ain't getting any better.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
It's not happening. Honestly.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
At the after like a year and a half, I realized,
I'm like, yeah, my lip has changed forever.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So you have this new appearance to your lip and
it's not enhancing or flattering, and it's right in the
middle of your face and you just sort of have
left to deal with it. Yes, right, all right, so
let's shot it. Let's chat a little about lips in
the anatomy until you understand. So it is totally, totally,
(03:33):
totally common what happened to you to happen, which is
unlike other areas. You fall and you hit your knee,
it swells up like a balloon. It becomes three times larger.
And then after six months, a year, whatever, the swelling
goes away. You might still have pain, but your knee
isn't twice as large. Yes, right, that doesn't really happen
anywhere else. But lips are very unique. And when a
(03:55):
lip gets traumatized punch cut, dog bite, serration, whatever, and
then it is repaired and or put back together, there
is a tremendous amount of swelling that develops because lips
are very vascular. And then as that swelling is going
away for whatever reasons, it doesn't fully go away, and
(04:17):
you're left with a scar tissue ball that changes permanently
the shape of the lip. I've seen it hundreds and
hundreds of times where people have gotten trauma and now
their lip is totally jacked up. And it doesn't take
a lot to make a lip not look good. Right.
It has its shape, and if you imagine this beautiful
(04:39):
shape that's symmetrical ish, right, and then all of a sudden,
a part of it is like out of it, like
some nubbin or something. It's really obvious, right. And then
as you know, it's obvious pretty much all the time,
especially when you smile, right, because when you smile, when
(04:59):
you're my mouth is closed, you can hide it, right,
You just learn to hide it. The minute you smile,
the upper lip rises pulls and it's ebutting a white background,
and any abnormality sort of gets accentuated. Right. Is that
was that your experience? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (05:17):
That was like and like I had learned along the
ten eleven years of like how to like fix my
mouth to like, you know, make my lip lean a
certain way, but one hundred percent once you smile, the
deformity is like on display, right, and you know, it's
like having to fight with being comfortable that, hey, this
(05:37):
is something that I know is noticeable, whether people want
to mention it or not, you know, and then just
kind of like, okay, well, how do I fix it?
Or is there a way to fix it?
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Got it? So, So to begin with this idea of trauma
to the mouth and then it leaving a persistent deformity
is very common and it's not common in other areas. Again,
ear lobes, eyebrows, eyelids, nothing increases in size or yes,
if you get in a horrific car accident, will your
(06:07):
face will be disfigured. But this isn't a horrific accident.
People get hit in the face all the time. My
son fell the other day. He falls. Always when you
fall and you hit your face, always your teeth go
through your lip. Always, because your teeth are right there
and they're sharp. And when you hit your face, you
and distance and had braces, but your teeth are always
going to puncture through. And it's very common to have
(06:29):
elaceration internally and often common for that to go through
the lip and come out the other side. So and
I had in my past sewn up hundreds of these
in the past. So then this thing heals a year,
year and a half goes by, and you notice, shit,
this is permanent. And here you are, young girl, how
old are you now? I'm twenty six, twenty six, so
(06:51):
you were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen twenty. It's very
very to begin with as we are, we're self conscious,
let alone have this obvious deformity in the middle of
your mouth. People when they find out like if I
were to be like, hey, you had some you had
some salad between your teeth. I had salad. You didn't
(07:11):
tell me like you were like, oh my god, I
can't believe I had this weird thing in the middle
of my tooth. That's how how much it matters what
our mouth looks like, let alone if I have this
goomba on my lip exactly. So you the question is
why did you wait eleven years for us to connect?
So explain to me. Was it? I didn't know any better.
(07:32):
I was financial. I forced myself to think that if
I fix it, it's vanity all the But what was
the reason to you?
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Kind of hit it like lists by list, I don't
know who where to rank, like hierarchically what was more
important to me? But it really was like a financial thing.
When you think plastic surgery, you think like, oh, thousands
and thousands of dollars, and so that was just kind
of something nice.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
So Number one, you're a young girl, young girl, right,
and then I got to give a shout out. You
were in the military. Military, what branch Navy shout out
to all military uh uh, serving served, et cetera. I
have a very very big soft spot for anyone in
the Armed forces obviously anyone that serves, but the Armed
(08:17):
forces in particular, we actually extend a tremendous amount of
courtesy to those individuals for the courtesy that they've extended
to us. So that's a huge shout out on the side.
We've been very lucky and blessed. I've taken care of
a lot of service men and women and we just
just love, just love that. So number one, you're a
young person. So the idea I'm assuming, Okay, let me
back up here, what did your parents you connected to
(08:39):
your parents? Yes, okay, what do your parents say? You're
a young girl with this deformity in your mouth.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Automatically, as soon as I noticed it, and it was
a topic of discussion, my dad was like, it'll go away,
it'll go makes me moisturizing.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
So I understand because obviously the idea I'm assuming you
don't come from a tremendous amount of money, right, okay,
So the idea of notion that my girl, my daughter
now needs to go to a bunch of plastic surgery
for trauma, like, come on, just suck it up. We
get dude. You know how many times it happened to
my So then a few like two years goes by,
he can't not tell me, he can't see it, Like
(09:15):
it's right there, dad, what he says?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Then you know, like you honestly, and then turned into
this conversation of like everybody has something.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Wrong with them. You know, you'll learn to like figure
it out, and it's.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Gonna build character. You got to learn to love yourself.
If not this, then something else.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
And then that whole narrative came.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
And you know, once you start kind of having those conversations,
especially in your formative years, you're like, well, is this something.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
That I do need to know? Do I really need
to worry about it even though I notice it every day?
Speaker 1 (09:46):
And what did your mom say?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
My mother, I think, you know, being a mom, she's okay.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
You know right, she wasn't. Well, it all depends on
your dynamics. Like, for example, my mom is very vain,
right to the point that my sister's not vain at all.
And one of their discussions and arguments ongoing over the
years was my mom telling my sister, you got to
put on more makeup, like why you dress that way?
Because my mom being vain for her, it was a
(10:13):
problem that my sister was in vain, whereas in reverse,
for example, if my sister were vain and my mom wasn't,
they'd be like, what's the big deal. So it all
depends on the dynamics, because if your mom was super vain,
she would be like, honey, we got to fix this,
Like this is our daughter. You know what I mean?
How many siblings do you have?
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Only child?
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Okay? Only child? Okay? So after a period of time,
So that was one was financial, right because at this
point you're sixteen, yes, seventeen eighteen, You're not going to
just be like if you're not lucky and your parents
aren't just wheeling into a plastic surgeon's office to get
a rhinoplasty. You got to got to get to a
place where you can afford it, and that's going to
take a minute. What were the other reasons that you did.
Did you at least start doing homework? Did you know like, oh,
(10:53):
I need to have this surgery, but I can't afford it.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
I didn't even know what kind of surgery I could
possibly have done, and like you know what's tr or trendy.
At least I want to say the back in like
five years after my accident, like the filling stuff, the
facial balancing sound like maybe that, but then I didn't
want to put anything.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
But you are African American, yes, and you have beautiful,
ginormously right so your lips are already like in a
ninety nine percentile. It's like, I got this weird thing.
You know what that is akin to. That's like I
injured my left knee, so as a result, I'm limping
like I got into an injury. I have my right knee,
(11:32):
which is normal. So you know what I'm going to do.
Instead of fixing my left knee, I'm going to damage
my right knee so that I walk with my gait
seems more normal. That's the idea of trying to fix
this thing by putting filler around it. But but interestingly enough,
that is the most common approach to this, which is
because so many people don't know there's anything else that
(11:55):
you can do about it. So okay, you don't do
any of that. So now and then, and one you
didn't know there was anything to do to your parents
weren't on board. Three you had no money to do
it at the time, so you go, go, go, And
then what is the trigger that you go, oh fuck,
well I can fix this. So what to tell me
(12:16):
when that happens you?
Speaker 3 (12:17):
So it's kind of a little blend of it.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
So I start ripe eighteen, joined the military, and I
start to get my own funds. And you know, location
on where you live, I mean getting orders and things
is a topic of discussion. And while I one of
the problems fixed I had the money, now is the distance.
And while I was trying to figure out, you know,
(12:41):
here and there, lip surgery, lip fix, lip some.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Pop right, you're trying to find a term. Because the
thing is why we're having this conversation, why this is
an important episode, is I want bigger breasts, big boobs,
breast enhancement, breast augmentation. There's one hundred key words that
stimulates like oh oh yes, oh god. There's like eight
hundred and fifty five thousand surgeons and four hundred and
fifty six million photos and three hundred and seventy five
(13:06):
thousand podcasts and four million youtubes. There is not that equivalency.
And I jacked up my lip. It's traumatic, my lip's
not correct. Fixed the shape of my lip surgery, Like,
so I get that. So you're putting in things in
the computer.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Trying to figure it. Finally I find something. And this
is like I want to say, maybe three to four
years before I found No, this is three to four
years before I came to get the surgery done.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
But this is when I found you.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Okay, And what was it that? What was it that
finally was the you broke through the other side.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Well, you had for me the right terminology I was
looking for on the website, which was I can't I
don't want to misspeak, but it was something along the
lines of what I was looking.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
For corrective correct corrective lip reduction or corrective lip enhancement
or surgical correct correction of lip. Those were all the
kind of concepts.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
That's the verbiage you had on your site. You had
like a summary or like a description of what the
service was, and.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Then you had before and afternoon. Yea, you had people
that actually came here.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
I mean you saw someone with a jacked up lip
and you're like, oh, that looks good.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Honestly, it was almost the exactly correction.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I remember the guy I was a young boy that
I mean, I have lots of these, but not everybody
allows us to use their images which is a shame
because this is exactly the problem we're having. It frustrates
me a lot. But anyways, a young boy that I did,
and he actually upper lip, right upper lip, had a trauma.
I think it was a baseball or something. And he
was lucky because his parents were more on board. And
(14:46):
he was probably eighteen or nineteen, and he had the
same thing in the right And I remember even his name,
which I don't even know why I remember, but I
know who you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
So you had all that.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
And this is again three or four years prior to
be being here now. And I was like founded, but
I was in Virginia. Okay, you're in Virginia, so I
had the money I found kind of you know.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
I mean, I'm still doing the research.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Sure, now that you start getting the terms, you can
start back engineering it. Right, Oh, I need a lip reduction?
What is that lip? And you can start benching. But
I would bet you a million bucks as you start
back engineering it, you're not finding three million photos, three
million videos.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
You're still not finding You're still not finding what you're
looking for or like for this specific procedure. You're still
not really finding. You find somebody that has that verbiage
on their site. You're not seeing any like work, you're
not seeing it.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
So yeah, okay, so and then so now you're in Virginia,
you have the money, you figured it out, So what's
the final step?
Speaker 2 (15:48):
So I was like, well, if this is, then it's
just kind of like this inner honestly from that point
till now moving back to California, because that's essentially what
the trigger was, moving back here and then being in
proximity to you. But prior to that, then it's like
this thing of like, well do I really want to
do that? Like I've been conditioned in my brain that like,
(16:11):
you don't need cosmetics, right because.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
This because it's interesting. This is farthest from cosmetic surgery.
This is reconstructive surgery. You didn't come here to say
my lips are small, I want them bigger, they're prettier.
You came in here and say that I got an accident.
I broke my femur, and I want my femur back
in its correct place. I ruptured my appendix. I want
(16:34):
the thing out. I tore my upper lip in a
traumatic accident, and I'd like my lip to look normal.
See how you had learned to make that seem like
it was cosmetic.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Yes, And that's exactly the term the you know, the
inner mental thing that I'm having to like get over.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
It's like, I mean, I'm just wanting to get it.
I don't want it.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
You know, I'm not asking for him to give me
a new lip, you know, I'm just wanting to restore
back to what it originally it was, you know, so
or to somewhat yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Close enough where I can manage it. And I can.
I'm not self conscious. I can smile with you know,
I don't know if every and if when you're listening
and you may not really know what she's talking about,
you're like, I just I can't understand it. When you
say I have small breasts, you can understand it. When
you say I'm a big nose, you can understand it
because it's more common. But you're like, I'm not sure,
but you can go to our website and you can
(17:24):
check it out. But when you have a disfigured lip
for whatever reasons, and I'm gonna tell you the different ways,
but from a trauma, and there is a lump in
your lip that's very visible and you are well aware
it's there. You're not not aware. I bet you a
million bucks it was no day in your life from
twenty fifteen till today that you ever didn't remember like,
(17:45):
that's right, nothing in my lip? Wow? Yeah. So imagine
every conversation, in every photograph, and every laughter, you are
aware that there's someone could be looking at your lip.
Is that a fair statement? Yes? It's the amount of
mental uh space that occupies is so enormous, and even
(18:09):
if it's subconscious, you'll only realize how much of space
it occupied until what till it's fixed? Yeah, and then
you hear the silence, the deafening silence of like, oh wow,
that was I was caring a very very heavy backpack.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yes, as soon as the swelling, I mean, I know
we're kind of jumping ahead, but I swear as soon
as the swelling went down and the scarr you know,
pretty much healed, and I was like could see my
smile for what it was, I was like, I am
not even thinking about my face, like I just know
that this is not like an issue for me anymore.
(18:49):
It just felt so It's like a comforting feeling that
to smile and be able to be like wow, like
you know, not wanting to edit, Like, come on now,
it's twenty twenty six. I'm like editing sometimes in my photo.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
But I don't think anybody. I mean, I think until
you're in that position. And there's a difference between having
a nose you don't love and having a nose that's
broken and crooked. Right, your lip isn't a lip you
don't like. Your lip is damaged. Yeah, So and then
it's like, oh my god, every smile and every conversation.
So let's stop for a moment here and let's start
(19:20):
expanding so I can educate people. When it comes to lips,
there are more or less two things that we do
with lips. We make them bigger, we make them smaller. Okay,
we can add or we can remove. Okay. Ninety nine
percent of the information available is around and surrounding enlargening lips,
(19:42):
because like breasts, having fuller breast is attractive, and being
flat and having fuller lips is attractive than having pencil
thin lips. So whether it's filler, fat, transfer, lip lifts,
they're all revolving around enhancing one's lip. Ten percent of
(20:03):
the dialogue is making lips smaller. There are three instances
in which you want to make the lips smaller. One,
I am born with really large lips. I'm talking ginormous,
and that is a matter of subjectivity, just like my
nose is too big, just like my breasts are too
big relative to what relative to me, me, me, I
(20:26):
don't like the way these lips look. They're making me
self conscious. I like them smaller. So when you are black,
or you are Asian or certain types of Latinos and
your lips are full, much like if you're born with
very large breasts, you'll want them reduced and made smaller.
It's hard for someone with small breasts to understand, but
(20:47):
you can have really large breasts where it's cumbersome, and
so is the same of lips. So it is I've
done lip reductions, making lips smaller, because nothing other than
I was born with real large lips. Now, that tends
to often be in men more than women, because you know,
women can tolerate or it's esthetically acceptable for you to
(21:09):
have large lips, But if you're a guid and you
got ginormous lips, it usually is not something you love.
The second is I made a massive error, and what
is that error? I injected a bunch of crap into
my lips that was permanent, and I was or wasn't
(21:30):
aware of its permanency. The most common such material is
liquid silicone, which, although is not common now, was very
common ten to fifteen years ago, and it was sort
of done in secrecy because we all kind of the
doctors kind of knew. Doctors kind of knew and knew
it was not ideal. But on the black market in
(21:52):
people's homes and these parties, people were injecting liquid silicone.
So it's silicone, same as breast, same as everyone else,
but liquid form. And then what would happen is you
would get someone to give you lip filler, filling of
your lip, except it was liquid silicone, and then they
didn't understand that later. Initially you were like, wow, this
is the bob. This looks great, but because your body
(22:17):
sees it as a foreign material, it's trippin' and it's
trying to fit. What do I do with this liquid?
Oh my god? And unlike an implant that is walled
off and is one item, this is millions of microscopic implants,
so your body sees every droplet as an implant. And
then what happens over time is it starts making inflammatory
granulomas like little pockets of scar tissue. And many of
(22:40):
these patients present with lips that have growing bigger and bigger, misshapen, lumpy,
bumpy reactive hormones. When you get have your period, it
gets all weird shaped and as a result, over time,
their lips look very disfigured. There is no way to
remove that fi you cannot reverse it like you can
(23:02):
like a hyaluronic acid or whatever. So the second category
of people who want their lips reduced is this second category,
and the third is yours. Traumatic injuries, dog bite, baseball
to the face, car accident, sports injury, whatever the case.
And as a result of it, it's disfigured my lip.
It's bigger, it's smaller, it's got a dent, whatever the
(23:23):
case is. So that is the category of lips that
falls under this group. Lip reductions are not done often
because they are very difficult. They're a nitpicky, fastidious, critical,
difficult surgery. Let me elaborate. There are different ways that
people do them, but I think all of them blow
(23:44):
and the only way to do it is the way
that I've been doing it because I think it's the
one that leads to the best outcome with the least
amount of scarring. If you look at a lip, it
has two parts. It has the outer part, which is
dry and has PI, and it has the inner part,
which is moist and has usually a redder tinge to it.
(24:07):
Your lips are more obvious because of the color. Mine
may be less so, and we refer to that as
the wet dry junction, dry outside wet inside. And if
you look at a lip, there's a transition a line
where it goes dry to wet, and I remove tissue
like a tummy tuck, like a facelift, like a blefroplasty.
(24:29):
I remove tissue along that line, and I remove the
tissue inside the mouth, not outside the mouth. So we're
not removing your actual lip proper, but rather removing And
when you do it, for the first two cases, I'm
born with large lips, or I did something stupid and
(24:50):
I put in my lips, you're usually removing the totality
of the upper lip and the totality of the lower
lip from one corner all the way to the other corner.
Because it's globally large with you, which makes it even
more difficult is you're only removing the section of lip
that is enhanced, whereas seventy five percent of your lip
(25:12):
is just normal, and you're trying to make that little
section that bulges out the appendix part go in become
flush with the rest of the lip without overdoing it.
And now there's a dent there. All of this is
done with these tiny ass little stitches. And what do
we know about the lip? It's one bloody ass mess
(25:33):
because the lip is very vascular, and so you have
to numb up the lip. You need to market perfectly, precisely,
and then you got to do this while the lip
tends to ooze a bit. You can't put a ton
of local in there because you distort the lip and
you have no idea what you're doing. So that is
a lip reduction. The reason you had a hard time
finding anyone to do it is nobody wants to do it.
(25:57):
There are no it's not like people running out to
do this procedure. It's a tedious, very challenging surgery that
has very little margin for error, and to be honest
with you, it's just not worth it. Like, hm, let
me think about this lip production for ten dollars life
presuction for fifteen dollars. Okay, I'll take a live production
(26:19):
all day long, right, So you don't really want to
like make this your air of expertise. I stumbled across this. Incidentally,
My ex associate was Garth Fisher and I were partners,
and he's been on my show before and he's a
very dear friend of mine. And when I started, I
was the young guy. I was just the guy in
the office. He was a senior guy and I had
(26:39):
just started. And the reality is that nobody wants to
do these things because they're very difficult patients and difficult whatever.
And he would send me these patients like they call
the office, Hey, you do do lip productions? No, but
doctor Rbandas And I was like, I do, and I
was like, oh shit. And so I ended up doing
these lips twenty some odd years ago because he was
(26:59):
said to me, because he didn't want to do them.
And as a result, I started doing more and more
of these and now obviously I probably do more than
most people. And I actually have a gallery and you
can actually see before and afters. The reason you're not
seeing that stuff is no one's doing a ton of
these are or a ton of patients, and b there
aren't a ton of they do know how to find you,
like you spend how long online years? Years? Literally years? Yeah,
(27:23):
and every patient I meet is like been added for
a while. It's not like they just decided over a weekend,
I want to do my nose job and then they
found four million nose searches. So that is a story
behind lip reductions. And you're instance a traumatic lip deformative
that needed a reduction. So I think the thing that
(27:44):
I enjoyed the most in particular about you, which I liked,
is how excited you got about this correction. And it
emphasized to me and made me remember how much I
enjoy what I do, because while it may have seemed
like it was a relatively small surgery in comparison to
like a Mommy makeover or facelift, the impact was as
(28:07):
great or probably greater than any other surgery I could
have been doing. So what I say is the return
on my investment. The return on your investment was quite high. Right.
In other words, a small amount of tissue being removed
liberates a whole lifetime of joy.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yes, And it's like one of those things too, where
I'm I don't know, kind of same thing with that
mindset of like do you need it, do you not
need it?
Speaker 3 (28:37):
I'm also in the you know, mind.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Frame of like it's just just a little bit, you know,
it's just that small change for those that had that
similar mindset.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
It's me. It's like sometimes we're not asking for like,
you know, the whole lip to be you know, gone
or change.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
It's just just like a small, you know, incremental, little
change and it's enough, you know, and for me, for me,
it was enough, and for me, like it's completely changed,
you know, Like my confidence it's like ten up my confidence, right,
it's not.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Crazy, yeah, I mean, but you're a young girl. That's
a long that's many years of one way or the other, right,
And so I always refer to as an exponential it's
what we do for you today will exponentially affect you
because you'll then be more confident, you'll get a better job,
you'll meet a better guy, you'll have a better future,
(29:31):
you'll write, whereas if you were the other version, you
probably be a little less confident. You probably right, right,
it's just a slight shift in who you are long
long over the course of forty fifty sixty years. It
makes a huge difference. What is your take with your parents.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
I got to a point where and this is just
like you know, being a young adult, you kind of
have to get to a point where you acknowledge that
this is your life. And if you have if you're
the one paying for it, you know, it's your life.
It's your face, you know, regardless of what people are
telling you, whether you should, they tell you you should
(30:08):
deal with it when it's not that bad, you handle
it how you want to handle it. So my parents
they were like, I don't think you need that. I
don't think it's necessary. I think it's a waste, right,
you know. And it's funny because now that the surgery
is done, like oh my gosh, your face, like you know,
it's just brighter.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Everything is just so you know, there, you know, confidence.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Everything, and it's just I just think it's funny because
I'm like, you know, if I would.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
Have listened to you, yeah, it's a it's such a
fascinating idea because it doesn't matter what it is that
we're talking about, classic surgery, dating, a guy taking the job,
going on a vacation.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
You know, we as humans are going to naturally want
confirmation from those we love. It's not like you just
went on a street and took a random survey. It's
your mom, it's your dad, maybe you're maybe your friends
or whatever. And if your circle is negative conservative naysayers,
(31:09):
they're not encouraging, they're pessimistic, then you are likely to
not do a lot of the things. Maybe in some
instances it was good that you didn't do it, but
in maybe many instances, you may have not done things
that in your own heart of hearts was a good idea.
So your advice is an excellent one, which is, if
you know you want to do something, you got to
(31:30):
somehow drown out the noise because ironically you did it.
And instead of them saying, well you know, I would
have expected them to be like, well I can't even
tell right. That would have been that I would have
made me feel better, like they were negative, you shouldn't
have done it. It's a waste of your money. You
do it, and they're like, well, I don't know. I mean,
it looks the same. But for them to come out
and be like, oh woy, good.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Josh, that's my point.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
I'm like, so you tell me you didn't notice it
in all these things, and then I show them before
and afters, you know, the photos and even my personal
photos that I say sorry, and even though my first
one photos that I took and they're like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
My god, oh I never noticed it was so bad.
You're like, I would have lost my shit.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I was like, see you now, if I would have
never listened to you, still wouldn't you know, had this
thing on my face.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Still would have.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Had, you know, like a confidence hit, you know, like
it's like one of those things that's like constantly humbling you.
I think I'm a firm believer that sometimes people need humbling.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Yeah, yeah, but there's different areas of humbling and I don't.
So this is where it's going to come down to you.
And there's no answer to this. Where do we draw
the line of this is or isn't necessary? That is
this sixty four million dollar question, And it will never
have an answer because I would say ninety nine percent
(32:45):
of people would argue that this was indicated right, there's
no arguing about this. Your parents, I'm sorry, are outnumbered
in this instance. But then let's say somebody does their nose.
Then fifty percent say it's indicated, then someone does their facelift,
forty percent say it's indicated. So what that shows you?
It's incredibly personalized and like everything else, it's really yours
(33:08):
and yours only, right, And the truth is that if
you believe it's going to help you, and you believe
it's an insecurity, and you have the funds to do it,
and you will be the one who deals with the aftermath,
then really it's yours and only yours to decide. And yeah,
I think that yours was a no brainer. But I
hear this all the time, right, People are like, I
(33:30):
really want to do this, I really want to do this. No, no, no, no,
I really want to do this. I really want you
know how many surgeries I do that. People have been
mulling it over for a decade a lot. There's the
classic you think, Oh, you're driving by and you saw
this billboard. You're like, shit, I want to get my
boobs done. That's not how people do this. People ruminate
and ruminate and ruminate and ruminate and manage and deal
(33:54):
and then tell themselves and you know this is irresponsible
and I don't have the money, and what if something
goes wrong? And so it usually most of my patients
have been added for three, five, seven, ten years. You know,
it's not just something that you whimsically just decide, let
alone a traumatic injury, right yours is not even like
it's not even like something like something cosmetic. So at
(34:18):
any rate, I think I'm number one. Good on you,
number two. I can see the impact because I can
just tell and I think that your story is very
telling of people who are dealing with things, whether it
is their lip, which I bet you they didn't even know,
or other kinds of de formities that they feel self
(34:38):
conscious about. And the reality is, well, maybe people tell
you just live with it. You know this, You know
you should learn to love yourself. That is one of
the biggest croc of shits I've ever heard in my
fucking entire life. Learn to love with yourself. What are
you talking about. If you have a something that you
cannot fix, then you need to learn to live with it.
(34:58):
But if there is a salution and within reason you
can do it, you're a fool. You're a fool to
suffer when there's a solution and it's within reason to
fix it. That means I don't have to put my house,
sell my house. I don't have to go into prostitution,
like you know, like it's within reason, I can fix
it and there's a good reasonable option. Learning to live
(35:20):
with it is just ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
Yes, I agree.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
All right, well that's what we're gonna leave me. That's
the answer to your all right, guys, So well, that
was a fantastic educational episode about lip reductions and particularly traumatics.
As always, if we're going to ask you two parting requests.
One is if you like to show forward it you
don't have a fucking clue who is dealing with some
lip related issue and you're like, oh wow, I didn't
(35:46):
know you had an issue, So forward this episode to
everyone you care about and love. And the other is,
as always, we beg you, we plead with you. If
you like the show, go write a review right now,
right up, get off the phone and go write it,
because it makes everyone excited and motivated to participate and
put this podcast together. All right, Well, thank you very
much for joining us, Thank you for your service, and yeah,
(36:12):
I'm so happy that you're happy. And that's a wrap
you guys. Until next week. I'm your host, Doctor Rider
Raban Signing off
Welcome to another episode of plastic Surgery on Censored. I'm
your host, Doctor Roddy Raband, and as always, we have
an amazing episode for you. That's because all the episodes
are amazing, but when we have an episode with an
amazing patient, it becomes even better. And we're blessed and
honored to have Jasmine, actually lovely lovely patient of mine,
who has joined us and has been kind enough to
(00:29):
come here, spend time and share her story with us.
And I think it's going to be a really interesting
episode because it's about a subject that we don't talk
about a lot. We don't have a lot of information
about it. As a result, I think when we speak
with Jasmine, she'll also share with you that it was
kind of like I couldn't really I didn't know where
to go, what to do. And the subject matter is
(00:50):
lips and lip reductions. We know a lot about lip enhancements,
lip augmentations, but we don't know a lot about lip reductions.
And I'm going to elaborate what that entails and what
your story is. But we are grateful to have you
and thank you for coming on the show. All Right,
So lips are obviously super important right, they're smack that
(01:13):
in the middle of your face. It's such a huge
part of who we are, what we look like, part
of our attractiveness, our sensualness. It's not like an ear lobe, right,
It's like, aside from the fact that it's just right
here in the center, it's something that we talk with,
we kiss with, it's something that we accentuate to make
it look attractive. And so having something not nice about
(01:37):
your lips causes people a lot of makes them very
self conscious. And so your story goes as follows, right,
so tell me your story and everything's great, and in
twenty fifteen, you're living your life.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
And I had a athletic injury where we was wearing
braces at the time and I was playing volleyball. I
thinka yeah or something like that, regardless of the fact
I somehow my knees ended up in my face some trauma,
but essentially my lip got jammed into my braces. Right,
(02:14):
So once they did the stitches on the inside and out,
I realized that there was a lot of swelling, And
once the swelling went down, I realized that the shape
of the natural shape of my lip was like completely changed.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Right, So there's like this hanging.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
You just suddenly had this sort of like redundant.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Excess, excess skin like fluid. I don't know what it was,
but it was just not normal. It wasn't what I
was used to. Sure, yeah, and it was just something
that I was like having to constantly tell myself It's like, oh,
it's not that bad. And I would ask and people
be like, yeah, I don't notice it.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
But I'm like you.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So at the beginning, you thought to yourself, I just
had trauma on my face, right, And I'm sure everyone
told you it'll get better. It'll get better, yes, right,
But at some point, because this was six eleven years ago,
at some point you realize this ain't getting any better.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
It's not happening. Honestly.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
At the after like a year and a half, I realized,
I'm like, yeah, my lip has changed forever.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So you have this new appearance to your lip and
it's not enhancing or flattering, and it's right in the
middle of your face and you just sort of have
left to deal with it. Yes, right, all right, so
let's shot it. Let's chat a little about lips in
the anatomy until you understand. So it is totally, totally,
(03:33):
totally common what happened to you to happen, which is
unlike other areas. You fall and you hit your knee,
it swells up like a balloon. It becomes three times larger.
And then after six months, a year, whatever, the swelling
goes away. You might still have pain, but your knee
isn't twice as large. Yes, right, that doesn't really happen
anywhere else. But lips are very unique. And when a
(03:55):
lip gets traumatized punch cut, dog bite, serration, whatever, and
then it is repaired and or put back together, there
is a tremendous amount of swelling that develops because lips
are very vascular. And then as that swelling is going
away for whatever reasons, it doesn't fully go away, and
(04:17):
you're left with a scar tissue ball that changes permanently
the shape of the lip. I've seen it hundreds and
hundreds of times where people have gotten trauma and now
their lip is totally jacked up. And it doesn't take
a lot to make a lip not look good. Right.
It has its shape, and if you imagine this beautiful
(04:39):
shape that's symmetrical ish, right, and then all of a sudden,
a part of it is like out of it, like
some nubbin or something. It's really obvious, right. And then
as you know, it's obvious pretty much all the time,
especially when you smile, right, because when you smile, when
(04:59):
you're my mouth is closed, you can hide it, right,
You just learn to hide it. The minute you smile,
the upper lip rises pulls and it's ebutting a white background,
and any abnormality sort of gets accentuated. Right. Is that
was that your experience? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (05:17):
That was like and like I had learned along the
ten eleven years of like how to like fix my
mouth to like, you know, make my lip lean a
certain way, but one hundred percent once you smile, the
deformity is like on display, right, and you know, it's
like having to fight with being comfortable that, hey, this
(05:37):
is something that I know is noticeable, whether people want
to mention it or not, you know, and then just
kind of like, okay, well, how do I fix it?
Or is there a way to fix it?
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Got it? So, So to begin with this idea of trauma
to the mouth and then it leaving a persistent deformity
is very common and it's not common in other areas. Again,
ear lobes, eyebrows, eyelids, nothing increases in size or yes,
if you get in a horrific car accident, will your
(06:07):
face will be disfigured. But this isn't a horrific accident.
People get hit in the face all the time. My
son fell the other day. He falls. Always when you
fall and you hit your face, always your teeth go
through your lip. Always, because your teeth are right there
and they're sharp. And when you hit your face, you
and distance and had braces, but your teeth are always
going to puncture through. And it's very common to have
(06:29):
elaceration internally and often common for that to go through
the lip and come out the other side. So and
I had in my past sewn up hundreds of these
in the past. So then this thing heals a year,
year and a half goes by, and you notice, shit,
this is permanent. And here you are, young girl, how
old are you now? I'm twenty six, twenty six, so
(06:51):
you were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen twenty. It's very
very to begin with as we are, we're self conscious,
let alone have this obvious deformity in the middle of
your mouth. People when they find out like if I
were to be like, hey, you had some you had
some salad between your teeth. I had salad. You didn't
(07:11):
tell me like you were like, oh my god, I
can't believe I had this weird thing in the middle
of my tooth. That's how how much it matters what
our mouth looks like, let alone if I have this
goomba on my lip exactly. So you the question is
why did you wait eleven years for us to connect?
So explain to me. Was it? I didn't know any better.
(07:32):
I was financial. I forced myself to think that if
I fix it, it's vanity all the But what was
the reason to you?
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Kind of hit it like lists by list, I don't
know who where to rank, like hierarchically what was more
important to me? But it really was like a financial thing.
When you think plastic surgery, you think like, oh, thousands
and thousands of dollars, and so that was just kind
of something nice.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
So Number one, you're a young girl, young girl, right,
and then I got to give a shout out. You
were in the military. Military, what branch Navy shout out
to all military uh uh, serving served, et cetera. I
have a very very big soft spot for anyone in
the Armed forces obviously anyone that serves, but the Armed
(08:17):
forces in particular, we actually extend a tremendous amount of
courtesy to those individuals for the courtesy that they've extended
to us. So that's a huge shout out on the side.
We've been very lucky and blessed. I've taken care of
a lot of service men and women and we just
just love, just love that. So number one, you're a
young person. So the idea I'm assuming, Okay, let me
back up here, what did your parents you connected to
(08:39):
your parents? Yes, okay, what do your parents say? You're
a young girl with this deformity in your mouth.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Automatically, as soon as I noticed it, and it was
a topic of discussion, my dad was like, it'll go away,
it'll go makes me moisturizing.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
So I understand because obviously the idea I'm assuming you
don't come from a tremendous amount of money, right, okay,
So the idea of notion that my girl, my daughter
now needs to go to a bunch of plastic surgery
for trauma, like, come on, just suck it up. We
get dude. You know how many times it happened to
my So then a few like two years goes by,
he can't not tell me, he can't see it, Like
(09:15):
it's right there, dad, what he says?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Then you know, like you honestly, and then turned into
this conversation of like everybody has something.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Wrong with them. You know, you'll learn to like figure
it out, and it's.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Gonna build character. You got to learn to love yourself.
If not this, then something else.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
And then that whole narrative came.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
And you know, once you start kind of having those conversations,
especially in your formative years, you're like, well, is this something.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
That I do need to know? Do I really need
to worry about it even though I notice it every day?
Speaker 1 (09:46):
And what did your mom say?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
My mother, I think, you know, being a mom, she's okay.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
You know right, she wasn't. Well, it all depends on
your dynamics. Like, for example, my mom is very vain,
right to the point that my sister's not vain at all.
And one of their discussions and arguments ongoing over the
years was my mom telling my sister, you got to
put on more makeup, like why you dress that way?
Because my mom being vain for her, it was a
(10:13):
problem that my sister was in vain, whereas in reverse,
for example, if my sister were vain and my mom wasn't,
they'd be like, what's the big deal. So it all
depends on the dynamics, because if your mom was super vain,
she would be like, honey, we got to fix this,
Like this is our daughter. You know what I mean?
How many siblings do you have?
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Only child?
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Okay? Only child? Okay? So after a period of time,
So that was one was financial, right because at this
point you're sixteen, yes, seventeen eighteen, You're not going to
just be like if you're not lucky and your parents
aren't just wheeling into a plastic surgeon's office to get
a rhinoplasty. You got to got to get to a
place where you can afford it, and that's going to
take a minute. What were the other reasons that you did.
Did you at least start doing homework? Did you know like, oh,
(10:53):
I need to have this surgery, but I can't afford it.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
I didn't even know what kind of surgery I could
possibly have done, and like you know what's tr or trendy.
At least I want to say the back in like
five years after my accident, like the filling stuff, the
facial balancing sound like maybe that, but then I didn't
want to put anything.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
But you are African American, yes, and you have beautiful,
ginormously right so your lips are already like in a
ninety nine percentile. It's like, I got this weird thing.
You know what that is akin to. That's like I
injured my left knee, so as a result, I'm limping
like I got into an injury. I have my right knee,
(11:32):
which is normal. So you know what I'm going to do.
Instead of fixing my left knee, I'm going to damage
my right knee so that I walk with my gait
seems more normal. That's the idea of trying to fix
this thing by putting filler around it. But but interestingly enough,
that is the most common approach to this, which is
because so many people don't know there's anything else that
(11:55):
you can do about it. So okay, you don't do
any of that. So now and then, and one you
didn't know there was anything to do to your parents
weren't on board. Three you had no money to do
it at the time, so you go, go, go, And
then what is the trigger that you go, oh fuck,
well I can fix this. So what to tell me
(12:16):
when that happens you?
Speaker 3 (12:17):
So it's kind of a little blend of it.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
So I start ripe eighteen, joined the military, and I
start to get my own funds. And you know, location
on where you live, I mean getting orders and things
is a topic of discussion. And while I one of
the problems fixed I had the money, now is the distance.
And while I was trying to figure out, you know,
(12:41):
here and there, lip surgery, lip fix, lip some.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Pop right, you're trying to find a term. Because the
thing is why we're having this conversation, why this is
an important episode, is I want bigger breasts, big boobs,
breast enhancement, breast augmentation. There's one hundred key words that
stimulates like oh oh yes, oh god. There's like eight
hundred and fifty five thousand surgeons and four hundred and
fifty six million photos and three hundred and seventy five
(13:06):
thousand podcasts and four million youtubes. There is not that equivalency.
And I jacked up my lip. It's traumatic, my lip's
not correct. Fixed the shape of my lip surgery, Like,
so I get that. So you're putting in things in
the computer.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Trying to figure it. Finally I find something. And this
is like I want to say, maybe three to four
years before I found No, this is three to four
years before I came to get the surgery done.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
But this is when I found you.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Okay, And what was it that? What was it that
finally was the you broke through the other side.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Well, you had for me the right terminology I was
looking for on the website, which was I can't I
don't want to misspeak, but it was something along the
lines of what I was looking.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
For corrective correct corrective lip reduction or corrective lip enhancement
or surgical correct correction of lip. Those were all the
kind of concepts.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
That's the verbiage you had on your site. You had
like a summary or like a description of what the
service was, and.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Then you had before and afternoon. Yea, you had people
that actually came here.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
I mean you saw someone with a jacked up lip
and you're like, oh, that looks good.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Honestly, it was almost the exactly correction.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I remember the guy I was a young boy that
I mean, I have lots of these, but not everybody
allows us to use their images which is a shame
because this is exactly the problem we're having. It frustrates
me a lot. But anyways, a young boy that I did,
and he actually upper lip, right upper lip, had a trauma.
I think it was a baseball or something. And he
was lucky because his parents were more on board. And
(14:46):
he was probably eighteen or nineteen, and he had the
same thing in the right And I remember even his name,
which I don't even know why I remember, but I
know who you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
So you had all that.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
And this is again three or four years prior to
be being here now. And I was like founded, but
I was in Virginia. Okay, you're in Virginia, so I
had the money I found kind of you know.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
I mean, I'm still doing the research.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Sure, now that you start getting the terms, you can
start back engineering it. Right, Oh, I need a lip reduction?
What is that lip? And you can start benching. But
I would bet you a million bucks as you start
back engineering it, you're not finding three million photos, three
million videos.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
You're still not finding You're still not finding what you're
looking for or like for this specific procedure. You're still
not really finding. You find somebody that has that verbiage
on their site. You're not seeing any like work, you're
not seeing it.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
So yeah, okay, so and then so now you're in Virginia,
you have the money, you figured it out, So what's
the final step?
Speaker 2 (15:48):
So I was like, well, if this is, then it's
just kind of like this inner honestly from that point
till now moving back to California, because that's essentially what
the trigger was, moving back here and then being in
proximity to you. But prior to that, then it's like
this thing of like, well do I really want to
do that? Like I've been conditioned in my brain that like,
(16:11):
you don't need cosmetics, right because.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
This because it's interesting. This is farthest from cosmetic surgery.
This is reconstructive surgery. You didn't come here to say
my lips are small, I want them bigger, they're prettier.
You came in here and say that I got an accident.
I broke my femur, and I want my femur back
in its correct place. I ruptured my appendix. I want
(16:34):
the thing out. I tore my upper lip in a
traumatic accident, and I'd like my lip to look normal.
See how you had learned to make that seem like
it was cosmetic.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Yes, And that's exactly the term the you know, the
inner mental thing that I'm having to like get over.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
It's like, I mean, I'm just wanting to get it.
I don't want it.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
You know, I'm not asking for him to give me
a new lip, you know, I'm just wanting to restore
back to what it originally it was, you know, so
or to somewhat yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Close enough where I can manage it. And I can.
I'm not self conscious. I can smile with you know,
I don't know if every and if when you're listening
and you may not really know what she's talking about,
you're like, I just I can't understand it. When you
say I have small breasts, you can understand it. When
you say I'm a big nose, you can understand it
because it's more common. But you're like, I'm not sure,
but you can go to our website and you can
(17:24):
check it out. But when you have a disfigured lip
for whatever reasons, and I'm gonna tell you the different ways,
but from a trauma, and there is a lump in
your lip that's very visible and you are well aware
it's there. You're not not aware. I bet you a
million bucks it was no day in your life from
twenty fifteen till today that you ever didn't remember like,
(17:45):
that's right, nothing in my lip? Wow? Yeah. So imagine
every conversation, in every photograph, and every laughter, you are
aware that there's someone could be looking at your lip.
Is that a fair statement? Yes? It's the amount of
mental uh space that occupies is so enormous, and even
(18:09):
if it's subconscious, you'll only realize how much of space
it occupied until what till it's fixed? Yeah, and then
you hear the silence, the deafening silence of like, oh wow,
that was I was caring a very very heavy backpack.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yes, as soon as the swelling, I mean, I know
we're kind of jumping ahead, but I swear as soon
as the swelling went down and the scarr you know,
pretty much healed, and I was like could see my
smile for what it was, I was like, I am
not even thinking about my face, like I just know
that this is not like an issue for me anymore.
(18:49):
It just felt so It's like a comforting feeling that
to smile and be able to be like wow, like
you know, not wanting to edit, Like, come on now,
it's twenty twenty six. I'm like editing sometimes in my photo.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
But I don't think anybody. I mean, I think until
you're in that position. And there's a difference between having
a nose you don't love and having a nose that's
broken and crooked. Right, your lip isn't a lip you
don't like. Your lip is damaged. Yeah, So and then
it's like, oh my god, every smile and every conversation.
So let's stop for a moment here and let's start
(19:20):
expanding so I can educate people. When it comes to lips,
there are more or less two things that we do
with lips. We make them bigger, we make them smaller. Okay,
we can add or we can remove. Okay. Ninety nine
percent of the information available is around and surrounding enlargening lips,
(19:42):
because like breasts, having fuller breast is attractive, and being
flat and having fuller lips is attractive than having pencil
thin lips. So whether it's filler, fat, transfer, lip lifts,
they're all revolving around enhancing one's lip. Ten percent of
(20:03):
the dialogue is making lips smaller. There are three instances
in which you want to make the lips smaller. One,
I am born with really large lips. I'm talking ginormous,
and that is a matter of subjectivity, just like my
nose is too big, just like my breasts are too
big relative to what relative to me, me, me, I
(20:26):
don't like the way these lips look. They're making me
self conscious. I like them smaller. So when you are black,
or you are Asian or certain types of Latinos and
your lips are full, much like if you're born with
very large breasts, you'll want them reduced and made smaller.
It's hard for someone with small breasts to understand, but
(20:47):
you can have really large breasts where it's cumbersome, and
so is the same of lips. So it is I've
done lip reductions, making lips smaller, because nothing other than
I was born with real large lips. Now, that tends
to often be in men more than women, because you know,
women can tolerate or it's esthetically acceptable for you to
(21:09):
have large lips, But if you're a guid and you
got ginormous lips, it usually is not something you love.
The second is I made a massive error, and what
is that error? I injected a bunch of crap into
my lips that was permanent, and I was or wasn't
(21:30):
aware of its permanency. The most common such material is
liquid silicone, which, although is not common now, was very
common ten to fifteen years ago, and it was sort
of done in secrecy because we all kind of the
doctors kind of knew. Doctors kind of knew and knew
it was not ideal. But on the black market in
(21:52):
people's homes and these parties, people were injecting liquid silicone.
So it's silicone, same as breast, same as everyone else,
but liquid form. And then what would happen is you
would get someone to give you lip filler, filling of
your lip, except it was liquid silicone, and then they
didn't understand that later. Initially you were like, wow, this
is the bob. This looks great, but because your body
(22:17):
sees it as a foreign material, it's trippin' and it's
trying to fit. What do I do with this liquid?
Oh my god? And unlike an implant that is walled
off and is one item, this is millions of microscopic implants,
so your body sees every droplet as an implant. And
then what happens over time is it starts making inflammatory
granulomas like little pockets of scar tissue. And many of
(22:40):
these patients present with lips that have growing bigger and bigger, misshapen, lumpy,
bumpy reactive hormones. When you get have your period, it
gets all weird shaped and as a result, over time,
their lips look very disfigured. There is no way to
remove that fi you cannot reverse it like you can
(23:02):
like a hyaluronic acid or whatever. So the second category
of people who want their lips reduced is this second category,
and the third is yours. Traumatic injuries, dog bite, baseball
to the face, car accident, sports injury, whatever the case.
And as a result of it, it's disfigured my lip.
It's bigger, it's smaller, it's got a dent, whatever the
(23:23):
case is. So that is the category of lips that
falls under this group. Lip reductions are not done often
because they are very difficult. They're a nitpicky, fastidious, critical,
difficult surgery. Let me elaborate. There are different ways that
people do them, but I think all of them blow
(23:44):
and the only way to do it is the way
that I've been doing it because I think it's the
one that leads to the best outcome with the least
amount of scarring. If you look at a lip, it
has two parts. It has the outer part, which is
dry and has PI, and it has the inner part,
which is moist and has usually a redder tinge to it.
(24:07):
Your lips are more obvious because of the color. Mine
may be less so, and we refer to that as
the wet dry junction, dry outside wet inside. And if
you look at a lip, there's a transition a line
where it goes dry to wet, and I remove tissue
like a tummy tuck, like a facelift, like a blefroplasty.
(24:29):
I remove tissue along that line, and I remove the
tissue inside the mouth, not outside the mouth. So we're
not removing your actual lip proper, but rather removing And
when you do it, for the first two cases, I'm
born with large lips, or I did something stupid and
(24:50):
I put in my lips, you're usually removing the totality
of the upper lip and the totality of the lower
lip from one corner all the way to the other corner.
Because it's globally large with you, which makes it even
more difficult is you're only removing the section of lip
that is enhanced, whereas seventy five percent of your lip
(25:12):
is just normal, and you're trying to make that little
section that bulges out the appendix part go in become
flush with the rest of the lip without overdoing it.
And now there's a dent there. All of this is
done with these tiny ass little stitches. And what do
we know about the lip? It's one bloody ass mess
(25:33):
because the lip is very vascular, and so you have
to numb up the lip. You need to market perfectly, precisely,
and then you got to do this while the lip
tends to ooze a bit. You can't put a ton
of local in there because you distort the lip and
you have no idea what you're doing. So that is
a lip reduction. The reason you had a hard time
finding anyone to do it is nobody wants to do it.
(25:57):
There are no it's not like people running out to
do this procedure. It's a tedious, very challenging surgery that
has very little margin for error, and to be honest
with you, it's just not worth it. Like, hm, let
me think about this lip production for ten dollars life
presuction for fifteen dollars. Okay, I'll take a live production
(26:19):
all day long, right, So you don't really want to
like make this your air of expertise. I stumbled across this. Incidentally,
My ex associate was Garth Fisher and I were partners,
and he's been on my show before and he's a
very dear friend of mine. And when I started, I
was the young guy. I was just the guy in
the office. He was a senior guy and I had
(26:39):
just started. And the reality is that nobody wants to
do these things because they're very difficult patients and difficult whatever.
And he would send me these patients like they call
the office, Hey, you do do lip productions? No, but
doctor Rbandas And I was like, I do, and I
was like, oh shit. And so I ended up doing
these lips twenty some odd years ago because he was
(26:59):
said to me, because he didn't want to do them.
And as a result, I started doing more and more
of these and now obviously I probably do more than
most people. And I actually have a gallery and you
can actually see before and afters. The reason you're not
seeing that stuff is no one's doing a ton of
these are or a ton of patients, and b there
aren't a ton of they do know how to find you,
like you spend how long online years? Years? Literally years? Yeah,
(27:23):
and every patient I meet is like been added for
a while. It's not like they just decided over a weekend,
I want to do my nose job and then they
found four million nose searches. So that is a story
behind lip reductions. And you're instance a traumatic lip deformative
that needed a reduction. So I think the thing that
(27:44):
I enjoyed the most in particular about you, which I liked,
is how excited you got about this correction. And it
emphasized to me and made me remember how much I
enjoy what I do, because while it may have seemed
like it was a relatively small surgery in comparison to
like a Mommy makeover or facelift, the impact was as
(28:07):
great or probably greater than any other surgery I could
have been doing. So what I say is the return
on my investment. The return on your investment was quite high. Right.
In other words, a small amount of tissue being removed
liberates a whole lifetime of joy.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yes, And it's like one of those things too, where
I'm I don't know, kind of same thing with that
mindset of like do you need it, do you not
need it?
Speaker 3 (28:37):
I'm also in the you know, mind.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Frame of like it's just just a little bit, you know,
it's just that small change for those that had that
similar mindset.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
It's me. It's like sometimes we're not asking for like,
you know, the whole lip to be you know, gone
or change.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
It's just just like a small, you know, incremental, little
change and it's enough, you know, and for me, for me,
it was enough, and for me, like it's completely changed,
you know, Like my confidence it's like ten up my confidence, right,
it's not.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Crazy, yeah, I mean, but you're a young girl. That's
a long that's many years of one way or the other, right,
And so I always refer to as an exponential it's
what we do for you today will exponentially affect you
because you'll then be more confident, you'll get a better job,
you'll meet a better guy, you'll have a better future,
(29:31):
you'll write, whereas if you were the other version, you
probably be a little less confident. You probably right, right,
it's just a slight shift in who you are long
long over the course of forty fifty sixty years. It
makes a huge difference. What is your take with your parents.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
I got to a point where and this is just
like you know, being a young adult, you kind of
have to get to a point where you acknowledge that
this is your life. And if you have if you're
the one paying for it, you know, it's your life.
It's your face, you know, regardless of what people are
telling you, whether you should, they tell you you should
(30:08):
deal with it when it's not that bad, you handle
it how you want to handle it. So my parents
they were like, I don't think you need that. I
don't think it's necessary. I think it's a waste, right,
you know. And it's funny because now that the surgery
is done, like oh my gosh, your face, like you know,
it's just brighter.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Everything is just so you know, there, you know, confidence.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Everything, and it's just I just think it's funny because
I'm like, you know, if I would.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
Have listened to you, yeah, it's a it's such a
fascinating idea because it doesn't matter what it is that
we're talking about, classic surgery, dating, a guy taking the job,
going on a vacation.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
You know, we as humans are going to naturally want
confirmation from those we love. It's not like you just
went on a street and took a random survey. It's
your mom, it's your dad, maybe you're maybe your friends
or whatever. And if your circle is negative conservative naysayers,
(31:09):
they're not encouraging, they're pessimistic, then you are likely to
not do a lot of the things. Maybe in some
instances it was good that you didn't do it, but
in maybe many instances, you may have not done things
that in your own heart of hearts was a good idea.
So your advice is an excellent one, which is, if
you know you want to do something, you got to
(31:30):
somehow drown out the noise because ironically you did it.
And instead of them saying, well you know, I would
have expected them to be like, well I can't even
tell right. That would have been that I would have
made me feel better, like they were negative, you shouldn't
have done it. It's a waste of your money. You
do it, and they're like, well, I don't know. I mean,
it looks the same. But for them to come out
and be like, oh woy, good.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Josh, that's my point.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
I'm like, so you tell me you didn't notice it
in all these things, and then I show them before
and afters, you know, the photos and even my personal
photos that I say sorry, and even though my first
one photos that I took and they're like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
My god, oh I never noticed it was so bad.
You're like, I would have lost my shit.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I was like, see you now, if I would have
never listened to you, still wouldn't you know, had this
thing on my face.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Still would have.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Had, you know, like a confidence hit, you know, like
it's like one of those things that's like constantly humbling you.
I think I'm a firm believer that sometimes people need humbling.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Yeah, yeah, but there's different areas of humbling and I don't.
So this is where it's going to come down to you.
And there's no answer to this. Where do we draw
the line of this is or isn't necessary? That is
this sixty four million dollar question, And it will never
have an answer because I would say ninety nine percent
(32:45):
of people would argue that this was indicated right, there's
no arguing about this. Your parents, I'm sorry, are outnumbered
in this instance. But then let's say somebody does their nose.
Then fifty percent say it's indicated, then someone does their facelift,
forty percent say it's indicated. So what that shows you?
It's incredibly personalized and like everything else, it's really yours
(33:08):
and yours only, right, And the truth is that if
you believe it's going to help you, and you believe
it's an insecurity, and you have the funds to do it,
and you will be the one who deals with the aftermath,
then really it's yours and only yours to decide. And yeah,
I think that yours was a no brainer. But I
hear this all the time, right, People are like, I
(33:30):
really want to do this, I really want to do this. No, no, no, no,
I really want to do this. I really want you
know how many surgeries I do that. People have been
mulling it over for a decade a lot. There's the
classic you think, Oh, you're driving by and you saw
this billboard. You're like, shit, I want to get my
boobs done. That's not how people do this. People ruminate
and ruminate and ruminate and ruminate and manage and deal
(33:54):
and then tell themselves and you know this is irresponsible
and I don't have the money, and what if something
goes wrong? And so it usually most of my patients
have been added for three, five, seven, ten years. You know,
it's not just something that you whimsically just decide, let
alone a traumatic injury, right yours is not even like
it's not even like something like something cosmetic. So at
(34:18):
any rate, I think I'm number one. Good on you,
number two. I can see the impact because I can
just tell and I think that your story is very
telling of people who are dealing with things, whether it
is their lip, which I bet you they didn't even know,
or other kinds of de formities that they feel self
(34:38):
conscious about. And the reality is, well, maybe people tell
you just live with it. You know this, You know
you should learn to love yourself. That is one of
the biggest croc of shits I've ever heard in my
fucking entire life. Learn to love with yourself. What are
you talking about. If you have a something that you
cannot fix, then you need to learn to live with it.
(34:58):
But if there is a salution and within reason you
can do it, you're a fool. You're a fool to
suffer when there's a solution and it's within reason to
fix it. That means I don't have to put my house,
sell my house. I don't have to go into prostitution,
like you know, like it's within reason, I can fix
it and there's a good reasonable option. Learning to live
(35:20):
with it is just ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
Yes, I agree.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
All right, well that's what we're gonna leave me. That's
the answer to your all right, guys, So well, that
was a fantastic educational episode about lip reductions and particularly traumatics.
As always, if we're going to ask you two parting requests.
One is if you like to show forward it you
don't have a fucking clue who is dealing with some
lip related issue and you're like, oh wow, I didn't
(35:46):
know you had an issue, So forward this episode to
everyone you care about and love. And the other is,
as always, we beg you, we plead with you. If
you like the show, go write a review right now,
right up, get off the phone and go write it,
because it makes everyone excited and motivated to participate and
put this podcast together. All right, Well, thank you very
much for joining us, Thank you for your service, and yeah,
(36:12):
I'm so happy that you're happy. And that's a wrap
you guys. Until next week. I'm your host, Doctor Rider
Raban Signing off
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