How to treat upper lip wrinkles and smoker's lines

Upper lip lines and deep wrinkles can be due to several factors including age, genetics, smoking, and UV exposure. It can also be a unique way of expressing ourselves known as ‘articulation lines or wrinkles.’ These lines can easily be treated with lasers, dermal fillers and Botox, depending on the cause. This YouTube Video demonstrates only one way to treat deep wrinkles around the lip- and that is with using laser resurfacing. Laser resurfacing can be fully ablative (as in this video using a Scition Erbium laser) or Fractional laser resurfacing using lasers such as Fraxel, ProFractional, Deep and Active FX – both CO2 and erbium devices. I tend not to perform much fractional laser resurfacing in this area as a stand alone treatment ( I tend to combine fully resurfacing with CO2 fractional). This is because the downtime for fully ablative laser resurfacing is around 8-10 days, whilst fractional laser resurfacing is around 5 days. Multiply that by 4 and you have a downtime that is more than double that of fully ablative lasers- plus the fact that the results are not as good! Treating upper lip wrinkles, and smoker’s lines is a technical procedure, as it is done free hand using either an Erbium or CO2 laser. Though technical, it only takes 15 minutes to perform, however I usually ‘blend in ‘ the surrounding areas with fractional laser or erbium to a shallower depth. Laser resurfacing itself is pain free, as I use local anaesthetic cream, block, and also partial sedation. S