Do you wrestle with lip lines? As you age, vertical lines can emerge around your lip area, adding years to an otherwise youthful complexion. Here’s a breakdown of what causes lip lines and how you can minimize their appearance.

What Causes Lip Lines?

Vertical lip lines are caused by a number of factors, including aging, environmental stress, everyday facial expressions and lifestyle choices:

Aging

The skin around your lips is thinner and more delicate than the rest of your face. For this reason, it is more vulnerable to the damaging effects of environmental stress and tends to show the visible signs of aging more quickly. In fact, vertical lines can appear above your upper lip as early as your 20s, after which you produce 1% less collagen per year. Over time, as elastin and hyaluronic acid also deplete, your skin becomes more fragile and less resilient. As your lips lose strength and volume, thin vertical lines can deepen into more prominent creases.

Vertical lines can appear above your upper lip as early as your 20s, after which you produce 1% less collagen per year.

UV Exposure

The aging process is accelerated by sun exposure, which further depletes your skin’s stores of collagen, elastin and hyaluronic acid. Since the lip area often goes unprotected, it is at an even greater risk of UV exposure than the rest of your face. UVA rays, in particular, expose this fragile area to damaging free radicals which actively break down and weaken healthy skin cells. This speeds up the aging process, resulting in fine lines and wrinkles around the lips.

Repetitive Movements

Lip lines develop similarly to other “dynamic” wrinkles (think frown lines and laugh lines). Repetitive activities like speaking, smiling and pursing your lips cause the muscles around the mouth to constrict, creating permanent lines and wrinkles. As Amanda Doyle, MD tells Yahoo Beauty: “The analogy we love telling our patients is: think of folding the corner of a piece of paper and what happens if you unfold and smooth it out. You can still see a crease left behind. In the same way, constant pursing of the lips causes tiny wrinkling over time.”

Smoking

Another culprit of vertical lip lines: smoking. It’s no surprise that prominent creases are also referred to as “smokers’ lines.” The repetitive motion of taking a drag from a cigarette, combined with the oxidative stress caused by smoke inhalation, can accelerate the development of fine lines around the lip area. The accumulated damage deepens wrinkles and dries out the skin, leaving lips with a pinched and puckered appearance.

How To Get Rid Of Lip Lines

Proper lip care should be an extension of your daily skin care routine. Follow these steps to keep your lips soft, supple and youthful-looking:

1. Exfoliate

Dry skin can exacerbate the look of fine lines and wrinkles, making lip creases appear deeper and more prominent. Refine your lip area with the Citrus Enzyme Lip Exfoliator from our Lip Trio. This lip exfoliant is formulated with citrus and pineapple enzymes to smooth dry lips and minimize the look of lip lines.

2. Treat

The Marine Flower Peptide Lip Serum is a luxurious cream serum that plumps the appearance of lips and reduces the look of fine lines and wrinkles around the area. It is specifically formulated to support the appearance of elasticity in the lip area, with both immediate and long-term plumping effects. 

Follow up the lip serum step with the immediate results of the Hibiscus Instant Line Filler. Forgo lip injections and fillers in favor of this natural Advanced Instant fX treatment which diminishes the look of fine lines and wrinkles in as little as two minutes.