Motivated by Kylie Jenner, my co-worker Ella and I decided to try getting lip injections for the first time. Warning: If you're squeamish around needles, you might not love this.
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Neither of us had ever had any kind of plastic surgery before, but we both felt like if we were ever going to change anything about our appearance, we would change our lips.
"My lips are honestly the one thing that I feel like I don't love about my face."
Three days before the procedure, we headed to Beverly Hills for a consultation with Dr. Berger, who would be doing the procedure.
During the consultation, they took "before" photos of our lips, and when I found out that there would be a side-angle difference after the injections, I was pretty shocked!
Ella and I were both pretty nervous about the procedure, but once we had the consultation and met with the doctor, our nerves turned into excitement.
...that is, until the day of the procedure came.
Moments before the doctor came in, we both started to question if we had made the right decision.
Luckily, Dr. Berger numbed our lips so we wouldn't feel the needles...
And then he injected both of our lips with Juvederm, an injectable hyaluronic acid dermal filler that typically lasts nine months to a year.
While he used only the filler for Ella's lips, the doctor also injected Restylane around my lips in order to better frame them and give me a more defined Cupid's bow and philtrum (those lines between your lips and your nose).
Afterwards, he used his hands to smooth out any lumps in our lips, which felt ~pretty~ weird.
Then he gave us a mirror and showed us our new lips, which were INSANELY swollen. If you can't tell by my face, I was pretty freaked out by my new look, and didn't know if the crazy swelling was permanent or temporary.
And afterwards, Ella and I both felt like we were kind of in a daze.
That night, about five hours after getting the injections done, my lips hurt a lot more than I anticipated they would, and I began to feel some regret about getting the procedure done.
Ella was also questioning her decision. I went to sleep hoping the next morning it would be all better, but when I woke up my lips were even MORE swollen! They ended up being really swollen for about three days, and the swelling had completely subsided after about a week.
Before getting the injections, Ella and I both thought it would be a simple, really non-invasive experience — it had even been kind of a joke to us. A week later, Ella felt like if she could do it all over again, she probably wouldn't.
I was a little more on the fence about it. After a week, once the swelling had gone down, I liked my new lips, but was still shocked by how scary, painful, and drawn out the whole ordeal was.
Ultimately, we realized that our original lips weren't so bad, and we gained a new appreciation for people under pressure to look their best all the time. Unfortunately, it took plastic surgery to get there.
Here’s what my lips looked like before the injections (left) and after (right). As you can see, it's pretty subtle, even though it felt like a pretty significant change to me:
Here are Ella's lips before (left) and after (right), which are even less noticeable than mine:
And here are Kylie’s before (left) and after (right):
