Two lines on the human face get pointed at in the mirror all the time, and hardly anybody knows what either of them is called. They sit around your mouth like a pair of brackets, one coming down from the nose and the other carrying on toward the chin, and having no everyday name for them is half of what makes them so difficult to think about clearly.
Smile lines and marionette lines: which is which
The first bracket runs from the side of your nose down to the corner of your mouth. Most people call it a smile line, or a nose-to-mouth line, and its clinical name is the nasolabial fold, which sounds a great deal more medical than it is. Naso for nose, labial for lip. The nose-to-lip fold, and that really is the whole translation.
The second runs on from the corner of your mouth down toward the chin, and it goes by marionette lines. That name comes from the puppet on strings: the wooden face with a line painted at each corner of the mouth, right where the hinged jaw swings. Once you've pictured the puppet you'll never again have to stop and think about which line is which.
Now, here's the thing worth saying before anything else, because it changes how the rest of this reads. You were born with a nasolabial fold, and so was everybody else. It's the seam where your cheek stops and your upper lip starts, and it's the reason a smile has a shape at all. Watch a child laugh and you'll see it appear and vanish inside a second. The years never decide whether you have one. What they change is how much of it is showing while your face is doing absolutely nothing.
Why the brackets deepen over the years
Picture a rug on a wooden floor with one end of it trapped under a heavy door. Now give the far end a shove, straight at the door. That end slides along quite happily, but the trapped end can't go anywhere at all, so the rug has nowhere to put what you've just pushed at it. You haven't added an inch of rug to the room. All the same, a ridge stands up in front of the door, and the harder you shove the taller that ridge gets.
That's the fold beside your nose. The seam where your cheek stops is the door: it's tethered down to what lies underneath, so it stays put while everything around it doesn't. The pad of fullness high in your cheek lends a little less support each year than it did the year before, the tissue below it comes down a little, and the seam is the first thing it meets. So the slack heaps there. No new skin arrived from anywhere; the support above it simply left, and the fold is where the difference collects.
Marionette lines follow the same rule one stop further down, as the corner of the mouth loses the support beneath it and a line runs off toward the jaw where there was barely one before. Years of smiling and speaking crease that same spot from the other direction, which is why the two so often turn up together, and why noticing one usually means you've noticed the other.
All of which makes the cheek a genuinely interesting place to look when somebody asks us about a fold, and it's a bigger idea than one paragraph can carry, so we gave it a piece of its own: why facial ageing starts higher than you think.
What filler actually does to the fold
Dermal fillers are clinically tested, biodegradable gels placed at precise depths to restore volume where the skin has lost it, and softening a nasolabial fold is one of the things they're made for.
Here's what's happening when it works. What makes a crease look deep from across a room is the step between its two sides. The cheek side stands higher, the lip side sits lower, and light crossing your face drops a shadow into the gap, in exactly the way the edge of a stair does. The taller that step, the more shadow the fold holds. Supporting the crease from underneath brings the two sides closer to level, and once the step is shallower there's simply less shadow for the line to keep. That's also why you see the change straight away rather than waiting weeks for it, because the gel itself is doing the supporting from the moment it's placed.
Filler answers a shortage of volume, and that's the whole of its job, which is why it suits the line that's there when your face is doing absolutely nothing. If your line only turns up when you move, that's muscle work instead, and the difference between anti-wrinkle injections and fillers is worth having straight before you book either of them.
There's a second route, mind you, and it never touches the fold at all: put volume back into the cheek that stopped holding it up, and the line eases as a consequence rather than as a target. Which of the two suits you, or what mixture of them does, is precisely what a consultation settles, and where a face wants both at once the 8-point facelift is built to do them together.
Marionette lines, your lips, and the limit worth knowing
Marionette lines have a close neighbour worth mentioning, and it catches people out: your lips. The corners of your mouth and the lip itself are one small region, so treating one changes how the other reads. That's why it comes up when people book lip filler. If your marionette lines are pronounced enough to affect the look of your new lips, we may recommend treating them alongside the lip work, and we'll explain exactly why before you decide anything.
Then there's the limit. If what's bothering you along the jaw is skin that has genuinely dropped rather than a crease running through it, volume placed underneath won't answer it, because the slack is in the skin rather than in the support beneath it. That's a question about lifting rather than filling, and a thread lift is where it starts.
Why flattening a smile line completely isn't the goal
Now for the part that surprises people, and it's the reason a good result here is quieter than you might be expecting.
A face with no lines in it at all stops reading as a face. Those two brackets are where your face folds when you're happy, so they're the shape of your own expression, pressed in over a lot of good years. Erase them completely and your expression loses its outline, and the face looking back has a little less of you in it.
There's a practical reason too. Push a fold past what the area can carry gracefully and the extra volume stops flattening the line and starts sitting forward as fullness your face never asked for. More isn't more here. What we're after is a fold that's shallower, softer, and holding less shadow, with your smile arriving in exactly the place it always did: natural, never fake or over-done.
So the honest measure was never whether the line has gone. It's whether you look like yourself on a very good day.
What the appointment involves, and what we look at first
The consultation comes first, always. Before anything else we want to know which of the two things is doing the talking, the fold itself or the cheek above it, because that answer is what decides where the volume goes and how much of it you actually need.
If filler is the answer, the treatment generally takes around thirty minutes. The Juvéderm® gel goes in at precise depths, in the places we planned together, and we go through aftercare with you before you leave. Fillers biodegrade naturally, so your body clears the gel gradually and the result is a temporary one by design. How long yours lasts turns on which area was treated and which product we used, and that's something we'd rather answer once we've seen your face than guess at beforehand. When it does start to fade, we plan maintenance appointments around it, so you keep the result for exactly as long as you'd like to.
Come and put a name to them
If you've spent years pointing at those two lines without ever having a word for them, you now have two, which is a decent start. Arrange your consultation. We'll tell you what's actually behind yours, which route suits your face, and how much of the line we'd soften against how much we'd deliberately leave exactly where it is.
Every treatment at Broadway Retreat is delivered by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic in Manchester, and nothing goes ahead until you've decided. Bring the brackets with you; they're far more interesting than they look.