Welcome to The Age of The “Lip Job”

Welcome to the age of the “lip job”, where plumping your pout with fillers is as mainstream as teeth whitening. But how did we get here? Joely Walker investigates

- Joely Walker

Some trends enter the beauty zeitgeist overnight, infiltrating our social-media feeds for a short while before returning to oblivion. Then there are the mainstays – those that slice through the buzz and carve out their place as a decade-defining beauty movement. Think ’90s over-plucked brows, ’00s D-cup boob jobs and, now, our fixation with lip fillers.

But you knew that already. You’re living in the age of the “lip job”, with the popularity of non-surgical lip treatments skyrocketing, particularly among young women. But how did fillers move on from their “trout pout” reputation to the modern working woman’s “tweakment” of choice? These days, it seems plumping your lips with a syringe full of filler is as routine as teeth whitening and as easy to fit into your lunch break as a shellac manicure. Scroll through Instagram and you could be forgiven for thinking that our obsession with pouting perfection is a recent phenomenon. But in fact, it supersedes the millennial era, with the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ 2016 report highlighting a 53 per cent increase in lip augmentations among people aged 18 to 55-plus between 2000 and 2016.

Angelina Jolie certainly piqued our interest (and envy) for the naturally plump lip in 2000 with the release of Girl, Interrupted, but it was 15 years later that one teenage reality-TV star cemented the world’s burgeoning obsession with augmentation. In May 2015, a preview episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians aired, in which Khloé Kardashian asked her youngest sister Kylie Jenner (aged 17 at the time) about her enhanced lips. As a result, Google searches for lip fillers peaked globally, and one London clinic reported a 70 per cent rise in enquiries over the next 24 hours.