Nasolabial fold
 Nasolabial fold marked (Wikimedia Commons)
| |
| Field | Face |
|---|---|
| Also known as | smile line, laugh line, nasolabial crease
|
The nasolabial fold is the crease from the alar base toward the corner of the mouth. Everyone has one when they smile. In looksmaxxing the complaint is usually a crease that is deep at rest — some mix of cheek-fat descent, an etched skin line, lost medial cheek volume, a hypermobile smile, and sometimes a recessed maxilla that does not hold the midface forward.
Marionette lines (down from the commissure) and jowls are often packaged with it as “lower face.”
What makes it deep
- Midface descent (malar fat pad slides)
- Skin crease / etched line
- Deep pyriform / recessed maxilla
- Loss of medial cheek volume
- Hypermobile smile (animation fold)
Procedures people use
| Move | What it does |
|---|---|
| Nasolabial fold filler (usually HA) | Volume in the crease or pyriform. Camouflage. Can bulge beside the nose if the cheek is still sitting on the fold. |
| Cheek filler / lateral malar | Volume above the fold; can reduce how much cheek hangs onto the crease. |
| Fat grafting | Same idea as cheek volume, with surgical harvest and unpredictable take. |
| Screw thread / mono thread in the crease | Collagen in an etched line. Modest effect on a static crease. |
| Cog thread midface | Hitches the cheek on a vector. Duration typically months to a couple of years. |
| Midface lift / deep plane facelift | Repositions descended soft tissue when laxity is the problem. |
| Canthoplasty / lower lid work | Different neighborhood; does not treat this crease. |
| Bimaxillary osteotomy / pyriform graft | Bone. Sometimes the reason the fold was deep; not sold as a “fold procedure.” |
This wiki's view
When the fold is from cheek descent, this encyclopedia treats hitching or lifting the midface — cog threads for a limited-duration hitch, midface lift or deep plane facelift when the laxity is surgical — as matching the problem. Filling only the crease is camouflage: the cheek can still sit on the line. A common combination is a little pyriform or medial-cheek volume plus a midface hitch, not a sausage of gel in the fold. Recessed bone is a different problem; a syringe does not move a maxilla.
See also
References
Anatomy condensed from standard facial-aging descriptions; Commons file Nasolabial fold.jpg (Mikael Häggström / USAF source), public domain.