Can you do an upper bleph to remove only a little bit of skin?
What about in one eye only?
I have one sagging eyelid after ultherapy, while the other eyelid is retracted.
Can you just do one eye?
Can you control how much skin is removed?
My eyes look crazy after this procedure.
They look smaller and sad as well.
Thank you for your question!
You submitted a photo showing asymmetry and you want to know if you could have a blepharoplasty
on one eye alone and just a little bit.
You also mentioned in your question that you had Ultherapy and you described a couple of
things: one is the asymmetry issue as well a statement about your eyes looking sad.
So I’m going to give you an idea on how we approach patients like yourself in my practice.
I’m a practicing oculofacial plastic surgeon in Manhattan and Long Island for over 20 years
and certainly, technologies like Ultherapy have come before such as Thermage and variations
like that and we’re seeing a lot of patients who are getting thermal devices not just Ultherapy
but just thermal devices in general.
So to answer the first part of your question, can you do blepharoplasty on one side.
Well, in most circumstances, what we want to do first is establish stability.
It has become very common in my practice to see patients who have had some type of thermal
devices and treatment who report that initially they saw some improvement and then there was
regression.
In other words, the effect and benefit of that treatment that appeared initially to
be somewhat effective ended up becoming backwards.
And in numerous cases, people actually said that they were worst off.
Now this is certainly anecdotal, one doctor’s experience but people have told me who have
had similar devices or devices in the category of thermal devices have said that their face
initially felt tighter and then they felt that their face was thinner and that they
lost volume.
With the brow area, I’ve had patients who came to me and went elsewhere and had this
treatment done.
And when they came back, they would tell me that the treatment worked and I have taken
their pictures before and I showed them the picture the day they came to see me, they
looked exactly the same.
So what I think the bottom line in your situation is, that there is a certain amount of variability
and unpredictability to the long term effects of this treatment.
So to answer again the first part of the question of can you do a blepharoplasty on one side,
of course you can always do blepharoplasty on one side but I suggest you wait and allow
months to pass before you make this irreversible decision.
When you do a blepharoplasty and you remove skin, for a surgeon, it is imperative, especially
when you are trying to achieve symmetry, that there be stability.
If that brow is moving around, then that’s going to make it difficult to achieve that.
So if you were to come to a practice like mine, I would probably observe you.
Maybe see you every 3 to 6 months and take photos from different angles and then maybe
up to a year determine whether or not you’d be a candidate.
I’ll also have to see before pictures of you before you had any thermal treatment.
So I would suggest that you discuss this with the doctor who performed this treatment for
you.
Try to see if there is some resolution that can help you with the symmetry issues and
see what can be done.
A lot of times, these treatments can be done in a way where they’ll do one treatment
and then they’ll have you go home and wait 6 months to get the full results.
Again, since I don’t offer this treatment, I can’t give you a detailed explanation
as to what is done and what the logic is but I can tell you that there are a lot of people
who are not achieving the goals that they had set out to achieve with thermal devices.
As a surgeon, I could tell you that there’s definitely a limit.
I have a radiofrequency device called Pellevé and I use it in a very specific and limited
applications but I don’t use it to try to do very dramatic lifting or to essentially
replace what a surgical procedure does very effectively and predictably.
So again, I suggest you wait and watch where thing settle out and once there’s stability,
that’s the time to make a determination of what to do.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question!