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Marionette lines are lines that run down vertically from the corners of the mouth towards (or to) your 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’. How can you soften them? Scroll down for all the FAQs.
Marionette lines settle in for all the same reasons as any other lines;
. The fat underlying your skin helps to plump it up and keep your skin taut. As your face loses fat, the skin has less support, which contributes to it sagging. Practitioners call this ‘soft tissue volume loss’.
. As you age, the bones of your skull gradually lose volume. In your face, the effect of this bone loss is a gradual loss of support for the fat and skin. You’ll hear practitioners call this ‘bony resorption of the mandible’.
. As the ligaments that support the area around your chin and mouth grow looser with age, your chin gradually heads for the floor.
. As it gets older, your skin loses its elasticity, so it stretches and sags.
. As wrinkles develop, incipient lines become more obvious.
While the above five problems all contribute to lines elsewhere on your face, neck, and body, marionette lines are a particular menace, because once they become etched on your face, they give it a permanently grumpy look and drag the corners of your mouth downward.
Apart from the five factors explained in the following section, the following five habits and factors may contribute to you developing marionette lines:
Yes, anti-wrinkle injections such as toxins can help — especially if pulling faces is contributing to your marionette lines. A touch of toxins in the muscles that pull down the corners of your mouth will damp down this expression, thus helping to reduce your marionette lines.
As usual with using neurotoxins in the face, you’ll want an experienced practitioner with a deft touch who can inject the right muscles with an appropriate dose to limit the muscles’ movements without freezing them fully. The toxin will take between one and two weeks to reach its full effect, so don’t expect instant results.
Try a vitamin C serum in the morning, and a retinol product at night.
There is an enormous number of these products available. Consult your practitioner for a specific recommendation of a cream or serum that will be suited to your skin or pick one of my recommendations, like:
Skinceuticals CE Ferulic
This serum, which combines vitamin C with vitamin E and Ferulic Acid, has become a skincare classic. If you have the cash to splash, it is a brilliant choice.
Medik8 Retinol 3TR
If you are new to retinol, this is a great product to start with. It’s a brilliant product, with a gentle formula that pretty much anyone should be able to use, and a time-release factor which slowly dispenses retinol into your skin.
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Yes, dermal fillers can help with marionette lines. This, too, is a subject about which you should consult your practitioner.
Depending on how deep your marionette lines are, your practitioner may choose to use a thicker, longer-lasting type of filler to treat them. The advantage of thicker fillers is that they last longer than thinner fillers, so you won’t need to have the treatment repeated as frequently. The disadvantage is that thicker fillers must be injected deeper into your skin to avoid lumpiness, whereas thinner fillers can be injected closer to the surface of the skin without producing lumpiness.
Which filler your practitioner will use is likely to depend on your facial anatomy and the depth of the marionette lines. The practitioner may also recommend using fillers to augment your cheekbones, 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.
Yes, clinical microneedling is a great treatment for stimulating the growth of new collagen in the skin. The tiny wounds created by the puncture marks made by the needles prompt a cascade of wound-healing substances within the skin, which nudge the skin into regenerating itself from beneath the surface. More collagen means skin that is more firmly supported from the inside, and which is better hydrated which means that it is plumper, too, and both of those factors will soften the look of the marionette lines.
Yes, laser is another option for treating marionette lines. Different practitioners prefer different types of lasers, but typical treatment would be to use a fractional laser to remove the damaged layers of skin in the marionette lines.
Fractional lasering fires the laser beam through a grid to create micro-channels of damage in the skin, which stimulate the growth of new skin. The laser treatment also stimulates the production of collagen, which gives your skin another boost.
Many practitioners use laser resurfacing and then follow up with dermal fillers, which boost your lasered-fresh skin from the inside.
Here are two main ways of minimising your marionette lines with makeup:
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