Oct. 2, 2025

Mighty Mouth:
the Lip Flips, the Liners,
the Pillowy-ness,
the Pressure

WORDS SARAH BROWN

LAUREN GREENFIELD, KYLIE JENNER LIP CHALLENGE, 2025

Sarah Brown on how one fleshy feature took over beauty.

“Remember how much you hated my lip liner?”

This is my friend Jenny, resurfacing an intervention I boldly staged one afternoon years ago at lunch at Fred’s, when I told her she wore too much makeup. She did. And she agreed. I meant well.

The irony is that her breezy reminiscence comes while sitting next to me for moral support in a treatment room at Dendy Engelman, M.D.’s plush midtown Manhattan offices, where I am frosted like a cake in copious amounts of numbing cream, awaiting something I never thought I would personally elect: lip injections.

I don’t naturally have full lips. No one in my family does. I’d always resisted this particular “enhancement” at the dermatologist’s office, and none of the myriad cosmetic wizards I’ve met over the years have ever pressed the matter when politely looking me over for things to improve on my face.

Even if popular culture would have me feel a tad under-endowed in this area, I’ve always liked my small lips with their heart-shaped cupid’s bow. They suit my face. They suit me. I always imagined that artificially pumping them up would seem a bit like a game of Mrs. Potato Head: affixing a cartoonish clip-on mouth onto my face, on top of the petite pair of lips I already own. And that my mother and my brother own, too, and likely many, many generations of ancestors in Russia who I never met.

But lately I’m feeling a bit pinched.
A bit deflated (not of spirit, but of body).
And I hate to say it, but a bit old.

All of a sudden, I am fixated on every pair of lips around me. Friends. Strangers. Celebrities. Babies. Everyone seems to have juicy, pillowy pouts, while mine looks like a squiggly flat line. I’ve noticed that I’ve slowly stopped wearing dark lip colors — plums and sheer berries were always my chosen shade; I loved a dark lip against my pale skin — and have turned into a boring neutral-lip-gloss person, as prismatic flesh-toned balms seem to make the un-fullness of this specific feature less noticeable (to me) and take focus away from the contours of my (possibly eroding?) lip line.

This is depressing talk. But it needn’t be — especially when there is so much to be done about (and to) the lips, if one wishes.

KJH.BRAND PRECISION SCULPTURE STYLO

DR. DENNIS GROSS DRX. SPECTRALITE LIPWARE PRO

Lips are having a moment. But it’s distinctly different from the last time they captured our undivided attention, a decade or more ago. Gone are the trout pouts, in are the lip flips. Plumping glosses and “treatments” no longer irritate and sting (remember tingling synthetic bee venom?); now they’re full of peptides and multi-molecular weight hyaluronic acid.

Lip-specific LED devices, and the Lyma home laser, promise to lessen puckered lines and plump collagen. Visible lip liner is suddenly OK. “Lip liner is king right now,” confirms Katie Jane Hughes, a makeup artist known for her work with Hailey Bieber, who, it’s worth noting, may have the world’s most-asked-for lips. (“Yeah, 100%,” says Hughes. “She’s got a great mouth, that girl.”)

For those, like me, who are scarred by the memory of 1980s mall rat culture, it is important to note that lip liner has changed. It’s not so much grown up as it has evolved, in terms of both technology and technique. It is no longer about drawing a hard line around your lips with a waxy pencil; now it’s about contour, shape and shadow via soft-focus, complexion-friendly pigments. It’s no coincidence that many of the best new products come directly from makeup artists themselves.

Hughes created her new KJH.Brand Precision Sculpture Stylo as a versatile tool to build contour and to underpaint. “It’s a crayon with a rounded tip and a diameter size that’s quite unique: bigger than a traditional lip liner, but smaller than an eye shadow crayon, which gives you control,” she explains. Sometimes she uses it to line across the cupid’s bow, which she admits can be oddly controversial among the lip-lining cognoscenti.

“I’ve been doing this on myself for a while and it ruffles a lot of feathers, which is funny,” she says. Hughes argues that sharply defining the outline of the cupid’s bow can look severe, and even clownish (“what your nan or auntie had down” — ouch), while softening the silhouette “to emulate a younger, more cherubic mouth,” produces a look that’s markedly more flattering.

Lisa Eldridge, the British makeup artist beloved as much for her iconic online tutorials as for her work with actresses like Keira Knightley and Felicity Jones, stands by a signature technique that rests upon feathery “scribbling” motions. “I never draw a line; it’s lots of mini circles, hardly touching the lip. It’s like you’re buffing the liner on,” she explains.

With her soft Sculpt and Shade Lip Pencils, she shades the sides and edges, leaving the middle of the lip bare, to mimic the way light bounces off the center of a spherical shape. “It’s quite a sculptural effect,” she says. “You’re drawing from the outer edge about a third of the way along, fading it in. That’s why a pencil that can blend is so helpful.”

LYMA LASER

LISA ELDRIDGE SCULPT AND SHADE LIP PENCIL

My own flirtation with a fuller lip requires a little more oomph. Plus, I’d like it not to rinse off. Which takes us back to my initial visit to the offices of Dendy Engelman. Engelman — universally known around Manhattan social circles as “Dr. Dendy” or just “Dendy” — decides we will stage my “work” in two phases, restoring and gradually building my “perfect lip” without the risk of over- augmenting. “We don’t want to change you,” she says.

Engelman has chosen to inject my top and bottom lips with Volbella. A filler specifically developed for lips, it has “the lightest, smallest hyaluronic acid particle size. It’s also been shown to bring a little bit of vasodilation to the lip, so the color restores. If you think about cute baby lips, they’re pink.” Plus, she adds, Volbella is known not to cause much swelling. “This is very life-friendly.”

She also decides to give me a lip flip — a mini-tweak that is currently all the rage, in which a tiny bit of Botox is injected into the vermillion border to relax the muscles around the upper lip, causing it to ever-so-slightly lift, or “flip” upwards and outwards. I’ve had it done before, and liked it, but the sensation once the Botox first takes hold is pretty comical — your lips feel like rubber — making politely sipping a cup of tea or drinking anything with a straw, for example, temporarily quite impossible. (My friend Emily was unable to blow up balloons for her six-year-old’s birthday party, having to explain through peals of laughter, “Mummy can’t do that right now!”)

So: A starter “teaspoon” of Volbella and one lip flip later, I’m on my way home, with a check-in for two weeks later penciled into the calendar. When I hear, in the meantime, that Jason Diamond, M.D. — the double board-certified Beverly Hills plastic surgeon to much of Hollywood — is in town, I pop by to say hello. Diamond routinely uses filler to refine and “contour” the natural borders of his patients’ lips. “Most of the people I take care of make a living with their faces; they don’t want to look overdone. They want sharper features, enhanced balance,” he tells me. He describes himself as a “slow builder,” taking his time to subtly add volume over actual years, so that his most photographed faces never look wildly different in pictures.

To effectively tackle what he woefully calls “the aged lip,” Diamond advocates for the lip lift, a simple yet impactful surgical procedure he performs on approximately 75% of the people who come to him for under-the-knife anti-aging work. “As we get older, not only do we lose volume, but the lip gets longer and thinner; the distance between the nose and lip lengthens,” he says.

The lip lift, during which he shortens that space, also manages to “roll” up the red under-portion of the top lip (a trick the lip flip cannot fully achieve), which also exposes a little bit of the upper teeth when the mouth is slightly open. “That’s considered ideal proportions,” he explains. It helps tighten vertical “barcode” lines, too, which, if needed, he treats with a blast from the mighty CO2 laser while he’s in the neighborhood. When done right, says Diamond, it’s a procedure that’s “pretty undetectable, but can be extremely powerful.”

Two weeks later, I’m back at Dendy’s, staring out the window 33 floors above Midtown. “I love what we’ve done,” she says warmly. For visit two, she injects a little more filler (am I starting to like this?) and adds Skinvive into the mix. A microdroplet injectable hyaluronic acid, it’s a hydrating “skin booster” that smooths the skin on the belly of the lip, improving skin quality and color without adding volume.

“It’s the sister to Profhilo, in Europe, but it’s crosslinked differently, and lasts six times as long,” Engelman says while I squeeze a silicone breast implant — her practice’s version of a stress ball — and she plunges a needle into my mouth. “I do this on a lot of actresses who are mid-filming and they can’t have, you know, anything change. It just looks more hydrated and youthful.”

Once the slight swelling has subsided the following week, I’m pursing my new-and-improved lips in the mirror, playing with liner (who me?) and wearing a burgundy stain for the first time in ages. The difference isn’t shocking. It’s still me — just better.