Lips

It is for the lip that has quietly faded. The border that used to be crisp and has gone soft, the top lip that disappears when you smile, the colour that needs a lipstick before you feel like yourself.

A wash of pigment is worked softly through the whole lip and blended out at the edge, so what you get is closer to a tint that has worn in beautifully than to make-up sitting on top. Most women are surprised how natural it looks once it has settled — and how much less they reach for a lipstick.

One thing it cannot do is make your lips bigger. Nothing in a needle of pigment adds volume. What it does is bring back the edge and even out the colour, and a lip with a crisp border and consistent colour reads as fuller than the same lip without one. If actual volume is what you want, that is filler, and that is somebody medically qualified, not Alison.

Choosing your colour

Your healed colour is your own lip colour plus the pigment, never the pigment on its own. Two women can have the same shade put on and end up somewhere different, which is why Alison matches it against your actual lip in daylight rather than off a swatch card.

Bring the lipstick you reach for most. It is the single most useful thing you can bring to the appointment — it tells her more about what you will be happy with than any amount of describing.

And expect to be talked down from anything very red or very dark first time round. Deep colours heal unpredictably, and softer is always the safer first pass, because more can always be added at the perfecting session and taking it away is the hard direction.

Cold sores — please read this bit

If you have ever had a cold sore, the virus is already dormant in you, and needle work on the lip can wake it up. It is common and it is nothing to be embarrassed about.

You will be asked to get antiviral tablets from your pharmacist or GP and start them before your appointment. It is not optional and it is not Alison being dramatic — an outbreak over freshly worked lips takes the pigment with it, and that is a patchy result you then have to correct.

Mention it at the consultation and there is plenty of time to sort out.

The first few days, honestly

Lips swell. Expect them noticeably fuller for a day or two, and much brighter and more lipstick-like than the finished result for the first three or four days.

Then they dry, tighten and flake, and around day five to seven the colour will look as though it has vanished completely. It has not — it comes back over the following week or two as the skin settles.

Do not book lip blush in the week before a wedding, a holiday or anything you will be photographed at. Four weeks of clearance is comfortable. Two is cutting it fine.