Lips

Our lips lose pigmentation naturally over time, as the colour begins to recede from the vermilion border. Lip tattooing restores the colour back into the lip line where it's been lost. It’s still lip skin - it’s just faded to white and needs to be coaxed back to life. It's perfect for client's looking to enhance their already beautiful lips, clients who've lost pigmentation, clients with scars, Fordyce spots, or asymmetry, you name it! Lip tattooing can give you a fuller, more symmetrical shape and colour. This new technique differs from previous lip pigmentation techniques as it's a more superficial implantation of pigment, causing less pain and trauma to the skin.

What can be achieved?

Enhance your natural lip colour
Warming up cooler coloured lips
Improving the shape and symmetry of the lips
Gives definition and the illusion of fuller lips without injectables
Neutralisation of melanin rich / dark lips
Colour correction for scars or uneven pigmentation
Restores colour lost in pale and ageing lips, and the vermilion border
Camouflaging fordyce spots
Long lasting colour - no more annoying lipstick bleed
Can last 2-3 years before needing a touch-up

Lip Blush/Aquarelle Lips

Lip Blush adds a soft rosy colour all the way back to the edge of the border, resulting in perfect fuller looking lips for every single client. This minimally invasive lip pigmentation service creates the look of fuller, softly-tinted lips. There are no harsh lines, or unnatural/overly-saturated colours used. We use a semi-sheer rosy pigment that allows your natural undertones to show through. This results in the most natural colour that's a unique and perfect match to you! Full pigmentation coverage is achieved, but the results are soft and subtle. It can be done with an ombre gradient for a volumising effect.

The Aquarelle style is very similar to Lip Blush. It gives a sheer pop of colour, but it’s more subtle since there’s no contour. Your lips maintain their natural outline.

Healing Process

The healing process for lip blush PMU typically takes around 2-4 weeks, but superficially they are healed within a week. In the first few days, your lips may feel slightly swollen or tender, and the colour will appear much bolder than the final result. As your lips heal, the pigment will soften and lighten—this is completely normal. Some light flaking or dryness is expected in the first week. Once fully healed, the colour will settle into a soft, natural-looking tint that enhances your lips without the need for daily makeup.

How do you choose the right colour for your lip blush?

It's no secret that a good blush shade can really compliment your lips and face. If you're fair-skinned, you might find some shades that look too intense or unnatural on your lips. Or, if you have olive skin, you might find that some shades can make your lips look a bit washed out.

If you have fair skin, you might want to avoid overly pigmented shades as they can sometimes look too harsh. Instead, opt for a baby pink, peach, or plum shade. These colours will add a touch of colour to your lips without looking too overdone.

If you have medium skin, most shades should suit your skin tone nicely. Apricot and berry shades are particularly flattering on medium skin tones. These colours will give your lips a lovely flush of colour without looking too artificial.

If you have olive skin, chances are you have a warm undertone. This means that cool-toned shades can sometimes make you look a bit washed out. Instead, opt for warm peach, bronze, copper, or rose shades of blush. These colours will complement your olive skin nicely and give you a healthy-looking glow.

Vermilion Border

The vermilion border is the demarcation between the lip and the adjacent normal skin. It represents the change in the epidermis from highly keratinised external skin (epidermis stratum corneum) to less keratinised internal skin (no epidermis). It has no sebaceous glands, sweat glands, or facial hair.

Look for the area around the lips that have no pores and no fuzz/hair (in exceptional cases we can exceed the border by 1-2mm max to correct minor asymmetry). We do NOT make the lips bigger with tattooing, we just bring life back to their lost shape.

Fordyce Spots

Fordyce spots (also known as Fordyce granules) are visible sebaceous glands that are present in most people - I find they show themselves more in clients who’ve had lip filler. They appear as small, painless, raised, pale, red or white bumps that can be visible on the inner surface and vermilion border of the lips. They are not associated with any illness, and nor are they infectious. That being said, a lot of clients are insecure about them and they can lead to an imbalance of shape and/or distortion of colour.

Dark Lip Neutralisation

This is a specialised treatment series for those with cool or dark lips in which we neutralise the darkness in the lips to reach a desired colour. We look at your lips and neutralise them by cancelling out the original colour. This can often be a life-changing procedure for clients who would prefer their lips to look lighter and more even-toned. The procedure usually requires at least two to three sessions to get the desired result. During the first session, a neutralising pigment is used to correct the cool tones in the lips. Blue hues are neutralised using an orange-based pigment, and yellow is used to neutralise purple. This may take more than one session in order to get the correct base. During the final sessions, the target colour is applied to the lips. This is usually in the form of a red pigment that shows up on the lips as a softer pink.

What is Neutralisation?

Neutralisation is a technique that works on "neutralising" darker pigmentation to create an even canvas for the lips. Where Eumelanin & Pheomelanin combine, we see hues in varying "tints", "tones" and "shades" of the undertones. This creates the optical illusions of Purple, Brown, Blue, Grey & Green hues. The colour you see in the lip is coming from the same place. The Pheomelanin (creating the undertone) plus the additional Eumelanin in varying intensity levels to create the hues. The darker areas can leave the lips looking patchy and finding lipstick tones to counteract the darker areas is difficult and time consuming to re-apply.

For the client who has quite dark areas of pigmentation, this can require more than 2 sessions. It all depends how the areas take to the neutralisation process, and sometimes clients who have really dark patches need at least 4-6 sessions. However I can't make any clear estimates without working on your lips. It's a process but it's worth it and over time the more pigment that's layered over it, the longer it will take to reappear. Neutralisation is for the long game.

First Session: The goal is to equalise and balance the undertone by giving the natural melanin what it is missing naturally and to move value higher.

Second Session:The goal is to enhance the new undertone and to further move the value higher.

This is always on a case-by-case basis. Clients are unique, and as such, unique considerations are always needed. Properly adjusting the mix for the clients natural Hue, Undertone, Temperature, Value & Saturation can provide you with beautiful natural results that can also help reduce trauma and avoid undesirable outcomes.

How long does the healing process take?

It is important to have patience throughout the healing process as with any permanent makeup treatment.

During the healing process after the dark lip neutralisation, some (but not all) may experience post-inflammatory hyper-pigmentation, which is where your lips may temporarily be darker after the treatment. The result of the first treatment will be visible after 6-8 weeks when the pigment will stabilise in the skin.

Can I have my lips tattooed if I suffer with cold sores?

Now this is a good question because YES YOU CAN ... but we have to warn you about the fact that this could cause you to have a break-out during the healing process. If you carry the herpes virus within your body, although it remains inactive most of the time, the trauma from having your lips tattooed can activate the virus and this will then cause a cold sore (or multiple cold sores) to appear.

You can HELP to prevent this from happening by visiting your doctor (or use an online doctor) who will give you a prescribed medication of Acciclovir, which you will need to start a few days before treatment and carry on taking throughout the healing process. Although this can help prevent, I always make sure my clients understand it is NOT guaranteed and they could still end up with a cold sore and that the choice to go ahead is completely at their own risk. Most of the time it will not affect the results of the treatment, but on the odd occasion it could cause the area where you had the cold sore to heal with slightly less colour than the rest (which we can then touch up 8-12 weeks later and perfect them).

Clients who suffer with cold sores regularly tend to have very tough lips due to a build up of scar tissue. This can make it a lot harder to tattoo and the pigment won’t implant as evenly and as smoothly. There is still ways around this though and after a couple of sessions, they are usually absolutely fine. So we don’t say that clients who suffer with cold sores can’t have this treatment done, but we just advise the medication and explain the complications that can occur during treatment which is only right to do so.

Can you get Cold Sores after having a lip PMU treatment?

Herpes (HSV1) aka cold sores, after lip PMU treatments may appear because the intense stimulation from the repeated needling provokes a flare-up of the virus. Since HSV1 is naturally present in most people, the only question is whether you had it before or got it after the treatment. If you already had HSV1 in your system you probably knew about it. You would have had cold sores at some point in the past. However, it’s also possible that you had the virus but it was latent.

In that case, the appearance of herpes after lip blush tattooing would be your first flare-up. This can feel sudden and scary, but it’s not something to panic about. Just treat your cold sore as it’s usually treated. The other possibility is that HSV1 entered your system after the appointment. That most likely means that you didn’t follow the aftercare instructions fully. HSV1 spreads between people via contact with saliva. It usually happens through kissing, sharing a glass or cup, using improperly cleaned cutlery, or otherwise touching your lips to a contaminated surface. The most important thing is to follow aftercare instructions. Protect your lips from contamination and don’t pick at the cold sores if they show up. Let them go away in their own time to minimise their chances of ruining your new lip pigmentation.

Lip Blush and Cold Sores

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