Back in 2012, a young woman asked London-based cosmetic surgeon Dr Tatiana Bezuglowa to give her big lips. The brief: to inject so much dermal filler into her upper and bottom lips that the enlarged pout would be unmissable – and unmistakably fake. For Bezuglowa, this marked the beginning of a beauty trend that would reach epidemic proportions: at its 2015 height in the US, filler was being injected into a woman’s lips every 20 minutes.
The procedure became popular worldwide. In 2019, 4.3 million people paid to have hyaluronic acid dermal filler, used to artificially enlarge the lips, injected into their faces. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact number of people paying for the procedure in the UK as non-surgical treatments are not logged or regulated. But a 2019 survey of 51,0000 young people in the UK found that 68 per cent know someone that had undergone the procedure. Across the country, women were paying upwards of £100 for lip “enhancement”, some so extreme that cosmetic surgeon Dr Osman Bashir describes them as appearing “deformed”.
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But is that all set to change? Surgeons in the UK are reporting a rise in the number of women paying to have their lip filler dissolved. Dr Bashir has been a cosmetic surgeon for 10 years. In the past year, he has noted filler removal is at the highest it has ever been. He estimates that about 20 per cent of his clients, from his businesses in Lahore and London, are now asking for their filler to be reduced or removed altogether.
New creams such as Topilase, which launched in 2021, have been manufactured so that patients can gradually dissolve filler at home, after first being prescribed by a surgeon.
How did the big lip reach such stratospheric popularity in the first place? One name springs to mind. In 2015, Kylie Jenner, at just 17 years old, revealed that she’d had temporary filler injected into her lips. The transformation was dramatic. Shortly after her announcement, the “Kylie Jenner lip challenge” began on social media.
In an attempt to copy her inflated lips, teenagers sucked on small cups to bruise and enlarge their pouts, posting the inflamed results online. Some US clinics reported an immediate 70 per cent rise in enquiries for lip filler treatment. That same year, Jenner launched the “Lip Kit”, a lipstick and lip liner which promised to replicate Jenner’s large lips. The inflated pout had become fashionable; like prairie dresses, or Veja trainers.
Fast-forward a couple of years to 2020, and the first signifier of the look’s fall from favour came when former Love Island contestant and influencer Molly Mae Hague took to her YouTube channel to declare that she had dissolved her filler and had reverted back to her natural face. “I have been getting my lips filled with filler since I was about 17,” she told her 1.7 million subscribers. “I’m rewinding younger mistakes.” In December 2022, Geordie Shore star Charlotte Crosby also announced that she had dissolved her lip filler after eight years of excessive injections.
In the past month alone, Bezuglowa has had 15 clients ask for their lip filler to be dissolved, a record for her clinic. Most regret the amount of filler they chose to get injected. On TikTok this trend is even more pronounced: the platform’s “lip dissolving” hashtag has been viewed over 64 million times. The videos that appear under the hashtag are all the same. A young woman with huge lips documents her dissolving journey. At first the lips swell: usually becoming even more inflamed. Then, on day three, once the swelling has reduced, the lips recede back to their natural size.
One such patient is Joey Andrews, 28, who paid to have her fillers removed after a clinic gave her excessively large lips. “I had such duck lips and I wasn’t happy with them,” she says. “It wasn’t painful but I had to ask the new doctor to re-add filler once they had taken it out so that I didn’t have overly thin lips afterwards.”
It’s not just big lips that are becoming unpopular: Bezuglowa is also seeing a rise in the removal of more extreme face fillers. “A lot of clients are asking for the filler under their eyes to be removed as well when they get rid of their lip filler, largely because it is very easy for the eyes to look too much. You only need slightly too much filler for it to look strange,” says Bezuglowa, who owns a clinic in west London. “We are definitely now at the tail end of that overly enhanced look.”
For Bezuglowa, the demise of extreme lip fillers is not all that surprising. “The trend now is a more natural look. People are a lot more focused on skin quality and looking healthy, with the preference towards a well rested face.”
Throughout the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, wellness and mental health became a priority for many people, who were also unable to access their usual injectables due to Covid restrictions. Social media was flooded with 10-step skin care routines and TikTok creators pushed the benefits of gut health. “I think the removal of fillers mirrors a wider trend in prioritising wellbeing, with an emphasis on nutrition and mindfulness,” says Bezuglowa. “These new trends are promoting a more natural lifestyle. Even trends like manifesting and spirituality promote a more natural look.”
Since the pandemic, dentist and aesthetic practitioner Dr Olha Vorodyukhin has seen a huge rise in consultations for her skincare services and, in tandem, a decline in high doses of lip filler. “Overly big lips are no longer in fashion from what I’m seeing,” says Vorodyukhin. “The aim for a lot of my patients now is a fresher look, where you might not necessarily notice the work that they have had done on their face.”
But getting filler removed is not straightforward. “It’s never easy,” says London-based aesthetic surgeon Dr Rozina Ali. In short, dissolving hyaluronic acid filler means melting it out of the face. “So you inject an enzyme called hyalase. But it dissolves all hyaluronic acid, so it can also dissolve the hyaluronic acid that is already naturally in the lip. This can cause an even smaller lip than what was naturally there in the first place.”
Ali says it may be better to leave filler to dissolve on its own over time. “I would only recommend getting it dissolved if it were obstructing blood supply or causing harm.”
Despite this advice, some women have had no choice but to use hyalase. “I have seen a lot of lip issues caused by filler that has migrated out of the lip,” says Bashir. When this happens, the filler moves out of the lip and into the face, causing a white moustache effect around the lip. Bashir adds: “This is usually done by a practitioner who thinks it is really cool to do the Russian Lip technique.”
The Russian Lip technique is a style of injecting lip filler that ignores the natural contours of the lip, inspired by the heart-shaped lips of Russian dolls. “It involves injecting the filler in a vertical fashion throughout the lips,” says Bashir. “You are literally poking the lip from all corners and trying to push the whole lip outwards. It just gives you a weird, flat kind of effect.”
Bashir blames the normalisation of this lip filler style on lack of regulation in the cosmetic industry. In the UK, anyone can inject filler. It is illegal to treat anyone under the age of 18, but there are no national minimum standards for practitioner training or regulated qualifications. Fillers can be injected in hair salons or booked last minute on the beauty app Treatwell.
“We are increasingly seeing a lot of really shady cosmetic culture: fillers are being injected by people who are not properly trained or experienced,” he says. “These are the people that are pushing the Russian Lip style, and filling the lips in the wrong places.” He adds: “These are the ones doing all the damage, especially because they often use really cheap, low-quality fillers.”
In the past few years, Bashir has seen an uptick in the number of clients coming to his clinic with poorly injected lip filler. “Some come in with a bulge in the inside of their mouth from where the filler has been poorly injected. It’s sad to see,” he says.
While the excessive look may have fallen out of fashion, the filler itself isn’t going anywhere. Lip enhancement is still popular in Bezuglowa’s clinic: the look is just far more subtle. “These things are always a rise and fall,” says Bezuglowa. “Until the next big thing.”
