Most people meet their new lips at the worst possible moment: the hall mirror, an hour after the appointment, everything tight and full and not quite matching. If that's where you're reading this from, the useful thing to know is that your lips are holding two things at once, and only one of them is staying.
Why your lips look like that on day one
Run a bath under a fast tap with a capful of bubble bath in it, and inches of froth stand above the water. Read the level off the top of that froth and you'd swear you'd run far more water than you have. The froth isn't extra water; the filling made it. Leave it a while and it flattens to nothing, and the bath is neither fuller nor emptier for its going.
Your lips on the day of treatment are that bath.
The water is the gel. Dermal fillers are biodegradable hyaluronic-acid gels placed at precise depths, and a measured amount went into the places we agreed with you. All of that was settled while you were still in the chair.
The froth is everything the placing itself caused. A needle has to pass through soft tissue to put anything anywhere, and tissue answers that with a little fluid — an ordinary thing for tissue to do, and the reason any treated area puffs up for a day or two. So the mirror is showing you the shape we agreed, with a day's worth of swelling on top of it.
That turns the fear most people carry the right way up. When the swelling goes down and your lips get smaller, the filler isn't going anywhere with it. Nothing leaves the bath when the froth flattens.
One boundary on that comparison, because it shouldn't be stretched past its use. Hyaluronic-acid gel is biodegradable, so your body does break it down in the end — but that runs over months, on a clock of its own, and it has nothing to do with the fortnight in front of you. What's leaving your lips this week is froth, not gel.
The change itself doesn't wait for any of it. A gel holds up whatever shape it was placed in from the moment it's placed, which is why you could see the difference before you left the room. What the fortnight is for isn't the result turning up. It's everything else clearing off.
Lip filler swelling stages, day by day
Every mouth runs its own clock, so take what follows as the usual run of it rather than a timetable.
The day itself. Full, tight, firm to the touch, and rarely even — one side often doing more than the other. Swelling doesn't arrive in equal measure, and no two halves of anybody's mouth were identical to begin with, so the first day hands you your own asymmetry with an uneven swelling laid over the top.
The morning after, and the day after that. For most people this is the peak, and it tends to turn up at breakfast rather than at bedtime. The reason is plain: you've spent the night lying flat, and fluid settles where gravity leaves it instead of draining away as it does while you're upright. Everyone knows the face that arrives at breakfast puffier than the one that went to bed, and a salty dinner the night before makes rather more of it; a lip that has just been treated does the same, only more so. An extra pillow on the first night or two helps, for exactly that reason. So this is the morning the mirror is worth the least: you're standing at the top of a curve, and every curve has a top.
The rest of the first week. The settling. Each day there's a little less froth and a little more lip, and what you're looking at starts to read as a lip rather than as a swelling. For most people the obvious puffiness has gone well inside this week. Small firm patches come and go while it does, which is swelling receding unevenly rather than anything having shifted.
Around two weeks. By now most people are looking at a result rather than at a swelling. The one place we put a number on filler settling is our chin augmentation page, which gives a final shape two to three weeks to arrive; with lips, we go through your own timings with you at the appointment instead. Either way, a fortnight is a fair mark to put in the diary, and a fair point to judge nothing before. That isn't stalling — it's the first moment at which what you're looking at is what you've got, and the honest point for any conversation about adjusting something, because a conversation on day two is a conversation about swelling.
What your lips want left alone at first
Your own aftercare was given to you out loud before you left, by the person who treated you, and that's the version that counts, because it was said about your lips rather than about everybody's. What follows is the reasoning underneath it, which is the part that tends not to survive the walk to the car.
Most of the list comes down to one idea. For a day or two, anything that sends extra blood to your face is sending it somewhere that already has more fluid in it than usual. That's what a hot shower does, and a sauna, and the hot end of a yoga class — you can see it on the face of anybody stepping out of a hot bath. More blood into an already swollen lip means more swelling to sit through, and a better chance of a bruise spreading while it's there. Strenuous exercise belongs in the same sentence, because your own heart does the sauna's job perfectly well: a walk is a walk, but the sessions that leave you red in the face are worth putting off for a couple of days. Alcohol arrives at the same place by a third route, which is why the evening of your appointment is the one to stay dry through.
Your hands are on the list for an entirely different reason. No pressing, no squeezing, no working it about with a thumb, unless we've asked you to — the gel went in at a planned place and a planned depth, and for the first day or two it can still be nudged off that plan. If your filler does want moving, you'll be told so and shown exactly how.
Leave the lipstick off until the morning, too. Each place the needle went in is a point too small to pick out in a mirror, and each one seals itself within hours; until they do, keeping the area clean is the whole of the reason, and a lipstick that has been rolling around the bottom of a handbag since March is not clean.
Bruising after lip filler, honestly
A bruise here is the needle's doing rather than the gel's. Lips carry a rich blood supply sitting close to the surface — the same reason they're pink and warm when nothing has been done to them at all — so there is more for a needle to miss on the way through than almost anywhere else on your face. When it clips something small, a little blood ends up where it wasn't meant to be, and that is the whole of what a bruise is.
Plenty of people get none. When one does turn up it behaves like any bruise you've ever had and goes at a bruise's own pace, and there's nothing to do about it beyond leaving it be and, once the skin has sealed, covering it if you'd rather. Botox aftercare goes into bruises at length, including the honest answer about arnica, and that part of it reads across to lips unchanged.
So if there's a wedding or a holiday in the diary, put a fortnight between the appointment and the event and the question stops arising.
Lumps in the first fortnight, and when to ring us
Firm patches and small lumps in the first couple of weeks are usually the swelling itself, which doesn't recede tidily or all at once. That's how a lip can produce a small hard spot that feels like something, and has gone without a trace by the next day.
What we wouldn't ask you to do is work out from a page which sort you've got. Nobody settles that by pressing on their own mouth, and a fortnight of trying is a miserable way to spend one. So if something is on your mind — a lump, a shape, one side not behaving like the other — ring us on 0161 526 2232 and describe it out loud. That's a short call, and it saves a long fortnight of pressing.
Ring at any point, about anything. You don't need a reason good enough to justify it, and you don't need to have worked out first whether it counts. If it does turn out to be worth us seeing, seeing it is a brief appointment rather than an ordeal.
Give it the fortnight
If you're counting days, the whole of this is one instruction: leave them be, and look properly at two weeks. If you're comparing yours against saved pictures in the meantime, the deck is stacked twice over: theirs have settled and yours haven't, and photographs mislead about filler anyway, as why good filler work vanishes in a photograph sets out. When what you're turning over is shape rather than swelling, that's a two-week conversation, and what people mean when they ask for Russian lips is where shape gets its proper hearing. If you had anti-wrinkle injections at the same appointment, those come with a list of their own, set out in Botox aftercare.
And if you haven't booked anything and you're reading this to find out what the week afterwards asks of you, that's a sensible way round to do it. Arrange your consultation at our clinic on Broadway in Manchester and we'll look at your lips properly, agree the shape before anything is done, and tell you what your own week afterwards looks like. Every injectable at Broadway Retreat is delivered by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic, and nothing goes ahead until you've decided. The lip fillers page has the fuller picture if you'd like to read it first.
Nobody measures a bath while the froth is still on it. Give your lips the same patience: two weeks, and then decide what you think.