Correcting Undesireable Permanent Makeup in Lips!

There are many reasons why finding a technician who is certified, knowledgeable, and experienced in your treatment of choice is necessary. On this page we will explore the ways in which a lip treatment can heal in an undesireable way ! Some of these issues are mistakes that could have been easily avoided. Other issues are based on undertones, skin type, or skin response. It is important to know that the pigment can heal with unflattering color tone, but it's more important to know who is most susceptible, and how to protect unflattering color tone from occurring in the first place, or how to treat it once it happens...

There are RULES in permanent makeup. Such as, DO NOT attempt to go too far outside of the natural border of your lips. I get it, you thought that if you just tattooed a new lip line in the shape of Angelina's lips when you started with Barbara Walter's lips, surely that would do the trick! Unfortuneately, that is NOT the case. The result will be an obvious and awkward looking clown-face appearance. Very noticeable and VERY wrong. In time, the color in your lip will subside, yet the unnatural, exagerrated lip line will still be there, and it wont be a pretty color either. In that case I recommend removing that altogether with a solution based method, and starting over with a specialist that knows what she's doing.

Another mistake that the technician will do or NOT do, is forgetting to add a little piece of insurance that prevents your lips from turning colors such as blue, purple, black, green. In the example below, the technician did not add a warm-up orange color before starting. This leaves the client vulnerable to their undertones. In time, your lips will absorb the pink colors you were trying to achieve and healing your lips a dark color. To correct these purple lips, we need to add a BLUE-LIP corrector color (looks bright orange in the tube) to bring it back to a more natural looking color.

Working with Skin of Color

Skin Differences

"Black skin is 60 to 70 percent higher in lipid content that white skin and has larger sebaceous glands. A layer of cells in black skin, although thinner, has a higher concentration of cells than in white skin. Because the stratum corneum is therefore denser in black skin, and the oil glands are larger, black skin is much more prone to lesion formation through follicular impaction." This quote appears in Christine Heathman's article, 'Acne and Skin of Color' that was published in Dermascope magazine.

Black skin appears thicker than other skin because of its compact nature with more cells per layer.

When trauma, injury, or disease occurs in black skin, the melanocyteswill do one of two things as it's healing:

1. Hyper pigment- The skin will produce more melanin, creating darker pigmentation areas.

2. Hypo pigment- The skin will stop producing pigment, leaving a white area.

Another issue that is more prone in black skin is a risk of hypertrophic scars and keloids, which are an over-production of scar tissue that can vary from a little to a lot of bulbous formations on the skin in the area of trauma and spreading beyond the trauma site.IF a person is prone to keloid scarring (both black and white), that person should not get any permanent cosmteic treatments performed, as it causes a mild wound but could still result in a undesirable result.

HYPERPIGMENTATION

Depending on ethnicity, clients that have a propensity to hyperpigment and/or have darker skin complexions may be subject to hyperpigmentation after their permanent makeup or scar camouflage treatments. Technicians need to be aware of post-inflammatory hyper-pigmentation in regards to all permanent makeup applications, and plan their procedures accordingly, and discussing this process with the client so they can adjust their expectations accordingly.

We prefer that our clients use Skin Medica's, Lytera. It's a medical grade product by the maker's of Botox and Juvederm. We suggest applying it for 2 weeks prior to the treatment and continuing for the next 4 weeks to prevent these hyperpigmented areas from occurring.

Many times after a lip color application, the client will acquire specks of hyperpigmentation on their lips. This seems to be fairly common, and normal skin color may return slowly over a period of months.This occurs in caucasian skin occasionally, altough it it will most likely occur on clients with heavy concentrations of melanin in their skin. Educcating the clients on the proper use of lightening products to be used on their lips is imperative, as many products will remove the pigment color as well as liglhten up the hyperpigmentation.