When it comes to plumping your pout, you have a lot of options. You can go the proven way with fillers and boost the volume of your lips or you may decide to take the unsure and sometimes dangerous path of using at-home lip enhancement tools. Whatever you choose to do, it’s important to remember that there’s a reason at-home lip treatments cost less than receiving fillers from a professional. They simply don’t compare to lip injections.
Let’s take a look at a few at-home lip enhancement and plumper treatments today to really understand how they work.
Suction-Based Lip Enhancers
I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the Kylie Jenner challenge. The wildly popular challenge involves putting your mouth around a shot glass, cup or other narrow vessel and sucking in until your lips start to swell. Rather than giving you your dream lips, this method typically results in a fresh, punched-in-the-face look. It can also be painful and potentially dangerous, causing broken capillaries, bruising, and even permanent damage if a glass vessel breaks.
Some companies decided to capitalize on this trend by creating “lip enhancement tools” that rely on suction. For all of the pain and risk you put your lips through with this sucking, you’ll end up with a strange-looking puffy mouth for a few hours at best and serious bruising at worst. It’s just not worth it.
“Natural” Plumping Lip Balms, Gloss or Gel
Many people buy or make their own lip products with natural ingredients like cinnamon, ginger mint, wintergreen, or capsium to slightly swell their lips temporarily. The big problem with this technique is that it relies on lip irritation. Irritating your skin on a regular basis is never a good thing.
These products tend to be uncomfortable, causing tingling, pain and sometimes a burning sensation. They can also cause your skin to dry up and scale if you use them too frequently. And unfortunately, you’ll have to use them frequently if you want to keep your lips looking swollen. Their effects only last for a few hours at most.
Treatment Lip Enhancers
After hearing complaints about the irritation caused by lip products with natural ingredients like cinnamon, big names in makeup started making lip enhancers for long-term lip treatment. These products feature ingredients that include collagen, retinol and marine-based fillers to help naturally plump your lips over time. While this is a promising step up from the tools above, it’s still not a great solution to thin lips.
It can take weeks or even months to see if these treatments will have any positive effect on your lips. And though ingredients that include collagen and retinol have proven to leave you with healthier skin, it may not provide any significant lip plumping results.
Tired of uncertainty and discomfort when it comes to plumping your lips? It may be time for you to give fillers a try. Fillers are non-surgical, non-invasive and require little to no downtime. Take a look at our before and after lip fillers gallery to see how one short treatment can give you the lips of your dreams!
