What are marionette lines? When do they appear? And what’s the best way to treat them?

The best ways to treat marionette lines, Maidstone, Kent

Maintaining healthy, youthful skin is a journey. But as time goes on, it can become more and more challenging to keep up. As we age, collagen production diminishes, and our skin no longer has the resilience and tautness that it did previously. When we think about facial wrinkles, our minds tend to go to the top half of our faces. Forehead wrinkles, crow’s feet, and frown lines are often target areas for treatments like anti-ageing skincare and Botox. But lines in the lower face can have just as much of an impact on our overall appearance. So, if marionette lines are your concern, read on to discover the most effective ways to treat and prevent them.

What exactly are marionette lines?

Marionette lines are the shadows that start from the corner of the mouth and run down towards the jawline, either side of the chin. They get their name because if you imagine a wooden puppet or ventriloquist’s dummy, those are the lines where the mouth block would drop when it is ‘talking’.

What causes them?

Marionette lines are caused by various factors. The most significant being the fact that your face loses fat with age. The fat underlying your skin helps to plump it up and keep your skin taut. As your face loses this fat, the skin has less support, which contributes to its sagging. The face also loses bone which causes your skull to lose volume gradually. In your face, the effect of this bone loss is a gradual loss of support for the fat and skin. Finally, as your skin ages, it loses its elasticity, so it stretches, and sags and lines and wrinkles become more apparent.

What are the best treatments for marionette lines?

Botox

Placing Botox in the muscles that pull down the corners of your mouth will damp down expressions, therefore helping to reduce your marionette lines. As usual, with Botox in the face, you’ll want an experienced practitioner who can inject the right muscles with an appropriate dose to limit the muscles’ movements without freezing them entirely. The treatment will take one to two weeks to reach its full effect and will last up to four months.

Dermal Fillers

When it comes to smoothing marionette lines, a common place to target with fillers is the midface and cheeks, which may sound like a bizarre strategy for treating the lower face, but actually it works a treat by raising everything below the cheek a fraction – and that may be enough to soften the appearance of your marionette lines.

We may also treat the area directly to smooth and plump the lines.

Profound RF

Skin tightening treatments work by applying heat to deep layers of the skin to boost collagen production. Profound RF is a non-surgical advanced needling treatment that does this exceptionally well. Using radiofrequency microneedling, Profound RF stimulates collagen production to tighten and smooth wrinkles on the face, making it particularly effective for lines around the mouth.

Profound RF can deliver radiofrequency to the precise level in the skin where the maximal effect will occur without damaging the overlying superficial layers of skin. The scientists who developed the technology were able to calculate that maximum collagen and elastin stimulation occurs when the deeper layers are heated to 67 degrees for precisely 4 seconds. Profound is the only technology that can monitor the skin’s temperature in real-time, allowing for precise control of these optimal parameters. This precise control gives Profound a more reliable clinical response than other non-surgical skin tightening technologies.

Sofwave

Sofwave is a new-to-the-UK ultrasound device which is FDA-cleared and clinically proven to remodel collagen. It uses Parallel Beam Technology to heat the tissue in the mid-dermis (the lower layers of skin), which triggers the body’s healing response and stimulates new collagen production with zero downtime. It’s an excellent solution for treating mild to moderate fine lines and wrinkles, sagging neck skin, and mild jowling around the jawline with little or no downtime.

If you’d like to find out more about the solutions for marionette lines, click here to book a consultation.