Lip blush or lip liner tattoo?

If your mental picture of tattooed lips is a hard brown ring drawn round a bare mouth, you are remembering a technique that went out of use twenty years ago — and you are right to have been put off by it.

It was not a myth. In the eighties and nineties the border was tattooed on its own, deep, in a solid line, with pigments that shifted colour as they aged.

Why the old work looks like that

Two things went wrong, and both were baked in.

Implanted too deep, the pigment crept slightly outward and softened into a halo instead of a line. And as it broke down it went cool, so a warm brown drifted towards grey or mauve. That is why old liner work looks the way it does now — not because the artist was careless, but because the method had that ending built into it.

What changed

Lip blush treats the whole lip instead of the border. Colour is worked softly through the body of it at a shallower depth, and the edge is defined by where the colour stops rather than by a line drawn round the outside.

So there is nothing left stranded when it fades. Modern pigments are made to fade lighter and warmer rather than cooler, and what Alison is aiming at is your own lip on a very good day — not a lip wearing lipstick, and certainly not a lip wearing an outline.

If you already have old liner work

It can very often be improved, and usually more than you would expect. There are three routes and which one you need depends entirely on what is there:

• Blending — working fresh colour through the lip so the old outline stops reading as a separate ring.
• Colour correction — neutralising a grey or mauve cast with a warm pigment before any new colour goes in.
• Removal first — lifting the worst of it, then blushing over once it has healed. Slowest and dearest, and sometimes the only honest answer.

Send Alison a photograph in daylight with no lipstick on and she will tell you which of the three you are looking at before you travel anywhere.