There's a way of smiling that plenty of people teach themselves without ever quite deciding to: lips together, corners up, the whole thing kept politely shut. If that's the smile in most of your photographs, the cause is usually one small muscle, and it's a far easier thing to change than you'd expect.
What a gummy smile actually is
The reassuring part tends to get skipped, so it goes first: there is nothing wrong with your gums. A gummy smile is a movement, and the movement belongs to your lip rather than to anything above it.
So, the machinery of it. A small band of muscle runs from either side of your nose down into your top lip, and its entire job is to lift that lip out of the way when you smile. Everybody has it and everybody uses it, because a smile that never moved the top lip wouldn't be much of a smile. In some faces that muscle is simply keener than average: shorter, stronger, quicker off the mark. It lifts the lip further than the smile actually needs, and once the lip travels past the top of your teeth, the gum above them comes into view.
Picture a curtain going up at a window. Pull the cord the right amount and the glass is beautifully framed and the job is done. Give it one extra tug and you're looking at a strip of wall above the window as well. Nobody intended that, and there was never anything wrong with the wall; the cord simply went further than it had to. Your top lip is the curtain. That muscle is the hand on the cord.
It's also why this shows up on your best smiles and hides on your careful ones. A small smile doesn't ask much of the muscle. A proper delighted laugh asks for everything it's got, which is a rather unfair arrangement when you think about it, because the smiles you'd most want photographed are exactly the ones that pull hardest.
How gummy smile Botox eases the pull
Anti-wrinkle injections, the ones nearly everyone calls Botox®, do one thing wherever they are placed: they relax a small facial muscle. In a forehead, that relaxing stops the muscle creasing the skin into a line. Just above the lip, it does something even simpler. It takes the top off the pull.
The amount used here is small, and it's small on purpose, because the aim is to shorten the lift by the little bit that's overshooting and nothing more. Take the very end off that lift and the lip still rises with your smile, then stops where it was always meant to. It sits naturally over the gumline instead of carrying on past it and drawing the curtain up over the wall.
Which brings us to the question almost everyone wants to ask and doesn't: no, your smile doesn't stop working. The muscle isn't switched off, only eased, so you still lift your lip, still grin, still laugh out loud at things. What changes is the last fraction of the lift, and the last fraction of the lift was the only part ever causing you any bother.
How it differs from a lip flip
These two get mixed up constantly, and fairly, since both use a small amount of the same injection placed near the top lip. They're aiming at completely different things, though.
A lip flip works on the ring of muscle around your mouth, rolling the top lip gently outward so more of the pink you already have is on show. Gummy smile treatment works on the muscle that lifts the lip, shortening how far up that lip travels. One is about showing more lip. The other is about showing less gum. People arrive describing one and picturing the other more often than you'd think, and a consultation is where that gets sorted out.
Why such a small change feels enormous
Here's the odd arithmetic of this treatment. Measured on your face, the change is tiny: a lip that stops a fraction lower than it used to. Measured in your life, it isn't tiny in the slightest.
Think about what you've genuinely been managing all these years, because it was never really your gums. It was the half-second of calculation before someone lifts a camera. The hand that goes up when something's actually funny. The polite closed smile you can produce on command, and the real one you quietly stopped letting out in front of people. That's a lot of small daily admin for something nobody else was ever grading you on.
When the lip stops going that far, all of it simply becomes unnecessary. There's nothing left to manage, so you stop rehearsing, and the smile that turns up in the photographs is the one you make when you're happy. People will tell you that you look well. Hardly anyone will work out why, which is exactly the result we're after.
You'll also stop checking the pictures afterwards. That one creeps up on you.
What gummy smile treatment can't fix
It has a limit, and you deserve to know where it sits before you book.
The honest limit here is proportion. Sometimes the gum shows because of how your teeth and gums are shaped against each other: short teeth sitting against a generous run of gum, for instance. Relaxing a muscle won't answer that, because the muscle was never the reason it shows. That's a conversation for your dentist, and it's where we'd send you instead of treating something that isn't going to respond. We would far rather point you to the right person than walk you through the wrong treatment.
There's a rough clue in your own mirror. If the gum turns up only on your biggest, least guarded smile and vanishes on a smaller one, movement is doing the work, and movement is what an injection can change. If it's there on every smile whatever the size, proportion is more likely to be the story. That's a clue rather than an answer, mind you. Which of the two you're dealing with is precisely what a proper look at your face settles, and it's why the consultation comes first every single time.
The treatment does nothing to your teeth themselves, either. It won't whiten them, straighten them or change their shape. It changes where your lip stops, and that is the whole of its job.
Your appointment, and when the change arrives
A complimentary consultation comes first, always. We check the treatment suits you, watch how your lip actually moves when you smile, and agree exactly what we're treating before anything is decided.
The appointment itself is short and thoroughly undramatic. A few small injections above the lip, no anaesthetic needed, any discomfort brief and minimal, and you're typically done in around fifteen minutes. You leave with clear aftercare for the first hours and days, then get on with your afternoon.
The change arrives gradually, so please don't stand in front of the mirror the next morning hunting for it. The full effect develops over about ten days as the muscle settles into its slightly shorter pull, and what you see at the end of those ten days is your result. We'll recommend a post-treatment appointment so we can look at it together, which matters more here than almost anywhere else on the face, because your smile is yours and whether it landed where you wanted is a thing only you can confirm.
It isn't permanent either. The muscle steadily regains its old strength and its old habit returns with it, so this is a treatment you repeat if you like what it does for you, and that's worth knowing at the start.
One last thought, and we'd offer it about any clinic you were considering: this area rewards a careful hand. The muscle in question sits among the muscles that shape your whole smile, and precision is what separates a lip that settles naturally from one that doesn't move quite as you expect. Anti-wrinkle injections have been performed for over twenty years, and the safety and the quality of what you get from them lie with the person administering them. At Broadway Retreat every injectable is delivered by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic in Manchester. Do ask who will be holding the syringe, wherever you go.
Come and show us the smile you've been hiding
If your lips have stayed shut the whole way through this, you already know why you were reading it. Arrange a consultation, smile at us the way you'd smile at something genuinely funny, and we'll tell you plainly what's causing it and whether this is the treatment that changes it. If it isn't, you'll hear that just as plainly, along with what would.
Then one day you'll laugh at something without thinking about your mouth at all. That's the entire point of it.