What medical treatments are available for dark lips and dark gums?

Ans. Dark lips:  Who doesn’t want soft and supple pink lips? Some people have natural dark lips while some develop dark lips with age, lifestyle habits, exposure, and certain medications. Lips may darken due to hyper pigmentation, smoking, sun exposure, hormonal changes like pregnancy, chemotherapy, vitamin deficiency etc.

Treatment:

• Laser treatment: it is a kind of aesthetic treatment, in which light is used to penetrate deep in to the surface of the skin of the skin to stimulate new cells and also destroy the old ones. This is called as de-pigmentation procedure.
• Topical cream: commonly advised product for lightening of lip, but your dentist or cosmetologist may have better option for it.
• Chemical peel: cosmetic treatment to remove dead cells, aid in growth new one, stimulate collagen synthesis and increased natural moisturizing.
• Permanent lip colour: Lip tattooing is one of the latest and quickest solutions. Permanent make up is a micro pigmentation process is done using a needle to inject colour and it fills colour pigments beneath the upper layer of the lip.
• Photodynamic therapy: In it, light is used along with chemicals. Also used for acne and wart treatments it is also commonly used for cancer treatment.
• Preventive lip discolouration:
• Quit smoking.
• Limit sun exposure, wear lip balm that contain sunscreen.

Dark gums:

Darkening or change in colour of the gums may be caused by various factors like smoking, lifestyle habit, some medications, hereditary, gingivitis etc.

Treatment:

• Gum bleaching: this is a process of removal of melanin pigment called as de-pigmentation to light the gum colour.
• Laser treatment: removal of pigmented tissue from the surface using laser light.
• Using gum graft.
• Phenols like chemical agents use for it.

Any procedure that you use such as home remedies should only be used after the advice of the dentists.