After your appointment.

Lips are swollen and tender straight after treatment, and usually look their most swollen the next morning. That settles over the following couple of days. They will also feel tight and dry as the surface starts to heal. All of that is ordinary.

• Clean hands, every time. Nothing else goes near them.
• Only what you were given. No other balm, no lip product, nothing bought to help. How much and how often is on your sheet, because that part depends on your skin and on the pigment, and it is your artist’s instruction rather than a general one. If you have mislaid the sheet, ask the studio for another.
• Blot, never rub. A clean tissue, pressed and lifted.
• Drinking through a straw is easier for the first day or two, and keeps cups off the lips.
• If the swelling bothers you the first night, sleeping with your head a little raised helps.

Around the third to fifth day the lips begin to flake, and colour comes away with the flakes in patches. It looks alarming and it is the most ordinary part of the whole process.

Do not pick, peel, rub or bite the flaking away. Pigment is still settling into skin that has not finished holding it, and taking a flake early takes the colour under it with it. It can also mark skin that would otherwise have healed cleanly. Every flake comes away on its own within a few days.

While the skin is still closing. For most people that is the first week to ten days, and your own sheet gives the number for you.

• Swimming pools, saunas, steam rooms and hot tubs.
• The gym, or anything else that makes you properly sweat.
• Direct sun and sunbeds.
• Lip makeup of any kind: lipstick, gloss, liner, and any balm other than the one you were told to use.
• Scrubs, exfoliants and active skincare anywhere near the lips. Retinol, AHA and BHA acids, vitamin C.
• Facials, peels and laser over the area.
• Very hot, spicy, salty or acidic food and drink. They sting, and they irritate skin that is trying to close.
• Kissing, sharing glasses and cutlery, and letting a pet lick your face. The skin is open; treat it that way.
• Whitening toothpaste on the lips themselves.

It is also worth not booking anything you want to look immaculate for in the fortnight after treatment.

The colour you leave with is not the colour you keep, and it does not travel in a straight line to get there.

1. The first days. Much darker and more saturated than the healed result will be. The before-and-after photographs on this site are labelled immediately after treatment for exactly that reason.
2. While it flakes. Patchy and uneven, as colour comes away with the flaking in some places before others.
3. Once the flaking finishes. Far lighter than you expect, often light enough that people are certain it has gone altogether. This is the stage that worries everybody, and it is ordinary: the new skin over the pigment is still clearing.
4. Weeks three and four. The colour comes back up and evens out as that skin finishes settling.

Judge the result at your top-up, not on day two and not in week one. Results vary with skin type, undertone, lifestyle, healing and aftercare.

A first treatment lays the foundation. The 4–6 week top-up (€100, 1½ hours) is where the settled colour is assessed and a second layer is worked in wherever it needs one. A top-up appointment is recommended for the best healed result.

Afterwards, keep sun off the colour. It is what fades permanent makeup fastest. Colour does fade in time; returning clients book a refresh priced by how long it has been.

If healing is not going the way it was described to you, or anything about it is worrying you, write to the studio. Early is better: we would far rather answer a question that turns out to be nothing than hear about it in a fortnight.

A photograph taken in daylight is the most useful thing to send with it.