Kiss My Puffy Lips
By ELIZABETH HAYT
Published: August 4, 2005
ONE afternoon at Sephora in Times Square, Evelyn Coleman, 24, a Columbia graduate student, made her way to the store's newly installed Plumping Station, a red plexiglass trolley filled with glosses, pencils and balms, which promise to plump up lips. She was looking for something to augment the size of her already full heart-shape mouth - and increase her sex appeal.
"When I go out, I use a lip plumper to feel more seductive and feminine," Ms. Coleman said.
Next at the trolley was Robin Denis, 48, a Manhattan sales executive, whose lips have grown wrinkled and thinner, as many women's lips do with age, because collagen and elastin, the fibrous proteins that keep lips full, gradually waste away. Ms. Denis wanted a remedy that did not include a trip to a dermatologist's office for injections to fatten her lips. "You don't want to go to a doctor and risk overdoing it," she said.
Such are the reasons that women in increasing numbers are trying new over-the-counter lip plumpers. They want to look sexier than they do now. Or at least they want to look as sexy as they once did.
Some of the products irritate or even sting the lips. And none of them can do as much to enlarge lips as injections of Restylane or other synthetic fillers. But many women want to avoid going to extremes. And the new products do enough - or promise enough - to keep sales soaring.
"Lips are the hottest thing right now," said Karen Grant of NPD Beauty, a division of the NPD Group, a market research firm. Lip plumpers, she said, are the reason that sales of all lip products (including lipsticks) are looking to double this year. Between January and May sales reached $25 million, $5 million less than for all of 2004.
Niche products like DuWop Lip Venom and Too Faced Lip Injection were introduced a few years ago, and now mass brands are making plumpers, too: Avon's Beyond Color Plumping Lip Conditioner, for example, and L'Oréal's Volume Perfect. More than 200 have come onto the market, priced from $6.99 for Sally Hansen Beyond Perfect Collagen Lip Lift to $36 for LipFusion.
The trend is a spinoff from the boom in medical procedures that fatten the lips. In 2004 nearly 500,000 women received injections of hyaluronic acid gels, including Restylane and Hyalform, mostly for the lips.
That women have developed a preference for large lips reflects changing notions of beauty. Thirty years ago Cheryl Tiegs was the cover girl ideal with her blond hair, blue eyes and relatively thin lips. But the population has become more racially diverse, and ethnic beauties now grace magazine covers. "Once upon a time we used to write a story about minimizing your lips," said Linda Wells, the editor of Allure. "Now that would never happen."
If puffy lips seem sexy, it is because they are a sign of youth and fertility. "Anthropologists have studied the ideal female face, which reflects a woman at her most fertile," Ms. Wells said. "The facial features should be full, wide eyes, full cheeks and wide pink lips."
No wonder so many women say they want their lips to look like the 20-year-old Scarlett Johansson's.
Do the topical lip plumpers work? Some users say they do. "I love LipFusion," Dr. Tina Alster, a Washington dermatologist, wrote in an e-mail message. "Not only do I use it daily, but all of my patients (despite also receiving Restylane, collagen and Botox injections) also use it."
LipFusion, on the market only six months, has become one of Sephora's Top 10 best-selling products.
But some have not seen a benefit. "Lip plumpers haven't proven to me that they work any better than lip gloss and a pencil or pinching your lips to make them fuller," said Emily Dougherty, the beauty and fitness director of Elle magazine.
Some topical products work by irritating the skin, making it redden and swell. Cinnamon, peppermint and caffeine are among the ingredients that do this. Too Faced Lip Injection has cayenne pepper. And Freeze 24/7 Plump Lips has Niacin, a B vitamin that dilates the blood vessels, causing mild inflammation. These may sting or burn when you put them on. Some people call the feeling a reassuring sign that the plumper is working. Others dislike it.
"It's like taking Tabasco sauce and dabbing it on your lips," said Yoki Ono, 29, a saleswoman at a Madison Avenue designer boutique. She tried DuWop Lip Venom, which contains cinnamon, wintergreen and ginger, in the hope that it would make her upper lip as full as her lower one. "You might as well get some extra-spicy Buffalo wings and eat them."
While the plumping of these irritants is fleeting, they may have lasting side effects if used too much. "I've seen a patient who got lip ulcers at the corners of her lips from the plumpers," said Dr. Sharon Jacob, an assistant professor of dermatology at the University of Miami.
Some products contain palmitoyl oligopeptides, short chains of protein fragments, which are supposed to trigger the production of collagen and elastin fibers in the lips. Some dermatologists say these may help fill out the lips, as long as they are used consistently for at least 30 days because it takes that long for collagen to grow.
But a small study published in the May-June issue of the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery found that one product containing palmitoyl oligopeptides (along with niacin, cinnamon flavor and other ingredients) did not work as promised. Dr. Sam Most, the chief of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle, asked seven women to use Lip Explosion, which on the product's Web site says it increases "actual lip volume and contour an average of 40.7 percent." Dr. Most said, "In subjects who used the product as directed over a long term there was no visible size change in the lips."
A spokeswoman for Body Innoventions, the maker of Lip Explosion, said that the company now has a new formula for the lip plumper.
Microspheres, tiny molecules, are a third plumping mechanism used in some products. They contain ingredients that are supposed to sponge up moisture from surrounding tissue and help the lips retain fluid. The microspheres in LipFusion, for example, contain dehydrated collagen molecules derived from fish.
But to the extent that microspheres or any other ingredients work, dermatologists say their effect is subtle. "They really work like spackling does to a wall," said Dr. Leslie Bauman, the director of cosmetic dermatology at the University of Miami, who routinely plumps her patients' lips with hyaluronic acid fillers. "They fill in the creases on the lips, making them look smoother. It gives you the optical illusion of shine and increased size. If you actually measured the size, there would not be an actual difference."
We are just a bit out of touch with our animal selves right now & have forgotten 
