Upper Blepharoplasty or a brow lift? What are the advantages of each?
I am in my late 30's and have thin pale skin that is prone to wrinkling. I feel that my
eyelids are heavily hooded for my age and I am considering either an upper blepharoplasty
or some sort of a brow lift/thread lift. I am fairly low maintenance as far as wearing
foundation or styling my hair so that scars don't show. Any input would be welcome.
Thank you for your question!
In your question you stated that you’re late 30s and you have a concern about the
appearance of your upper eyelid and you’re asking about the merits of doing a brow lift
versus an upper eyelid procedure. and you submitted one photo that’s very helpful.
Well, when you think where you’re at at this stage of your life, giving your skin
type, you are unfortunately in a situation where there is more advanced aging changes
probably due to the genetics soft your skin possibly some environmental factors where
there is sun exposure, whether there’s a history of smoking could possibly have a role
in the accelerated aging but a few years ago, I wrote a book called “The Fine Art of Looking
Younger” and it has always been my desire to help people understand what are some the
things happening with the aging process and when we look at the context of the individual’s
face, you don’t have to always address every last thing to get a rejuvenated look. So the
point of me saying that, has to do a question with a brow lift versus an upper eyelid blepharoplasty.
I would suspect that the brow position that you have now is not very different from what
it was 10 years ago. When I look at journals in our field and I see examples of people
showing before and afters of brow height from brow lift, I respectfully disagree with the
choices of authors made on lifting brows before I think a lot of times these patients look
way too surprised.
In someone who’s 39 like yourself, I think that the better approach for you is a conservative
upper eyelid blepharoplasty. By doing an upper eyelid blepharoplasty, I think you would be
able to achieve a more definition of you upper eyelid but by keeping the brows stable, you
are going to avoid that surprised look. There are a lot of people walking around whose eyebrows
are lifted a little too much and they look perpetually surprised. If you just want to
get a sense of that, just raise your eyebrows a few millimeters and you’ll see how much
of an impact it has on your facial expression.
When you have upper eyelid hooding, it actually ends up dominating the shape of your eyes.
So you may have an beautifully almond shape to your eyes but if you have hooding, it makes
the eyes look sad or tired. So I think that you would probably benefit from an upper eyelid
blepharoplasty but the key is not to overdone. We have patients who come to us from all over
the world who are unhappy with over aggressive removal of skin and fat around the eyes. And
the upper eyelids in particular, it’s a great challenge because if so much volume
is removed, there is extensive amount of work that needs to be done in order to restore
that.
So what I always tell my patients is we can communicate. We draw, they see what we’re
going to do and they have a clear understanding of what’s going to happen and what to anticipate.
In fact, I roll their eyelid in and show them what they can anticipate. I think being conservative
is a good strategy. It’s always possible and necessary to enhance but I think if you’re
this young, it’s really important to be overly aggressive.
So again, my advice would be do the upper eyelid blepharoplasty, do some research, find
qualified experienced artistic cosmetic surgeons and get a sense of really what your desired
look is and once you’re comfortable with that, move forward with the procedure and
of course ask the question which I didn’t mention about, how it’s done, local anesthesia
versus LITE™ sedation versus general anesthesia. In our practice, we do everything under local
anesthesia with sedation. Our recovery is a lot faster. In the modern world, people
need to get back to their normal lives as quickly as possible.
So, moving forward, meet with qualified cosmetic surgeons and get some ideas about how the
procedure is done and follow your instinct as to who is resonating with you in terms
of your goals and the way you want it done and move forward. I think you’ll have a
very nice result. So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you
for your question!