People are getting their lip fillers dissolved because the fillers migrate
I take a keen interest in beauty trends, including the more invasive types of treatments out there like injectables. For about ten years, lip fillers have been trending big time. But that plumped up look–first popularized by Kylie Jenner–may be on its way out. Celebs like Blac Chyna and Amy Schumer have recently had filler removed, and they’re not the only ones. Yahoo Life interviewed plastic surgeons, nurse injectors, and influencers who talked about how complications from fillers and changing trends are leading people to dissolve their filler.
The long shadow of the Jenndashians: Kylie Jenner has set plenty of trends in her time. From blue hair and chokers to matte lipstick and face-snatching contour, Jenner’s “King Kylie” era changed the way many young people approached style and beauty throughout the mid-2010s.
But the height of her influence, one could argue, came by way of her filled lips and accompanying pout products. “Kylie with all her Kylie Lip Kits and the filler, that was the look back then. It was crazy,” Jade Mitchell-Clyde, a 24-year-old Los Angeles-based content creator, reflects on for Yahoo Life. But recently, Mitchell-Clyde and a horde of other former filler fans have been having their injectables — lip and otherwise — removed.
Overfilling leaves the filler with nowhere to go: Ginille Brown, a cosmetic nurse practitioner based in Los Angeles, says overfilling could also contribute to the rise in migration discourse online. “When you’re just trying to force product into a space, and doing it way too quickly, and the lip hasn’t had time to expand, the [filler] goes above the border of the lip,” says Brown. “I have patients who have paper-thin lips, and they want really full lips, and I have to tell them that even if I were to put six syringes of filler in you, your anatomy is not going to allow it.”
This trend is big on TikTok: The #lipfillerdissolved, and #lipfillerremoval hashtags alone have nearly 28 million and 10 million views, respectively, and there was a 57% increase in filler reversals from 2020 to 2021, according to a 2022 trend report by the Aesthetic Society.
Kylie Jenner was deeply influential in the lip filler craze of the early 2010s. I remember being in college and seeing Kylie with suddenly massive lips. It changed how I did my makeup, right down to the lip colors I chose. People don’t want to give the Jenndashian clan credit, but they do know how to start trends. Funnily enough though, I’ve never bought anything from Kylie’s makeup line.
While the TikTok interest in filler removal is big, I’m not sure it foretells an equally large shift in the number of people getting fillers in the first place. I think people will just start using fillers in more subtle ways and getting smaller amounts. Even one of the influencers in the Yahoo article admits that after getting her lip filler dissolved, she went back for more, just a much smaller quantity.
I got half a syringe of lip filler for the first time last year. My face is very asymmetrical and I just wanted my lips to look more even and balanced. The results are subtle, and I still look like myself, just enhanced by a couple of millimeters. A good injector, like the one I had, will not pressure you into getting more than you need. She actually stopped injecting before we had used the full vial because, as she put it, “you have room, but not that much.”
I love my lip injections and I’ll keep getting half a syringe once a year. I also believe that we shouldn’t shame people for getting injectables of any kind, even if we may disagree with their choices. But it sure is a weird time in beauty. Between fillers going out of style and the buccal fat removal craze from earlier this year, it seems like the trends are shifting back to an aesthetic of thinness, even in our faces. At least that’s the undercurrent I’m picking up on.
photos via Instagram and credit: Avalon.red
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