Vacuum plumps lips - if it doesn't suck them off
Posted: Thursday, October 15, 2009 2:13 PM
By Melissa Dahl
What it is: JolieLips Lip Plumping & Enhancement System, $27.95.
What it claims to do: It’s supposed to give you full, Angelina Jolie-style lips – and I’m guessing that the name “JolieLips” is meant to not-so-subtly push the Angie connection. The Web site promises that this device make your lips “fuller and sexier” without using injections, causing pain or “nonsense tingling cream” to do so.
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My experience: When the device arrived in the mail, I excitedly ripped the box open. And then promptly closed it. Something about an oversized, oddly-shaped pump arriving in an unmarked box made the whole thing seem vaguely dirty, and I guiltily looked around my apartment to make sure my roommate wasn’t home. She wasn’t. It was clearly time to pump things up.
The instructions say to relax your lips and give the softball-sized doodad several short squeezes for 10 seconds. (They do not, however, say how to deal with the disgusting amount of slobber that will result from using a suction device on your mouth.)
It did hurt a little, but I sort of expected that – I was, after all, essentially applying a hand-pump vacuum to my lips. But I remembered it also took me a while to get used to the sting from plumping glosses like Lip Venom. Plus, the pain seemed beside the point, because it appeared that JolieLips actually delivered on its promise. My lips really did look fuller – and redder – than they normally do. I was so happy with the results at that point that I tried it again a few hours later, since the instructions suggest using the pump several times a day. (Side note: Really? Several times a day? Pulling a gigantic pump out of your purse and affixing it to your face isn’t quite the same thing as subtly reapplying lip gloss.)
But when I looked in the mirror the next morning, my lips looked … odd. To be precise: It looked like I had been punched in the mouth. The center of both my lower and upper lips had turned a deep bluish-purple that refused to be hidden, no many how many layers of lipstick I slathered on. My lips were visibly bruised that entire weekend, meaning I had to endure hilarious taunts from my friends. (“What up, Blue Lips?” and “Heh, did you just eat a blue raspberry Otter Pop?" were among my favorites.)
I do wonder if I was a little too aggressive the first time I tried JolieLips, because a few weeks later I summoned the courage to try it again (very, very gently this time) and didn’t experience any bruising.
What the expert says: Plastic surgeon Dr. John Canady said he wasn’t surprised by my experience with JolieLips. He explained that the pump creates a vacuum around the lips, and “this negative pressure is a type of trauma to the lip that causes it to swell,” says Canady, who is the president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. While JolieLips could cause fuller lips, he noted “so could getting punched in the mouth.”
He said it probably could work, albeit briefly; you really would have to commit to using this thing several times a day, as the instructions suggest. Canady did say that it would be helpful if there was some way to adjust or keep track of exactly how much pressure you’re applying.
“There probably is some place in that pressure curve where you can induce a little bit of short-term lip swelling if you‘re going out on a date or something and you just want to pump that up a bit without them getting bruised,” says Canady, who’s also a professor of plastic surgery at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
Bottom line: Fuller lips just weren’t worth the physical and emotional pain I experienced with JolieLips. I’ll stick with my lip gloss.
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