Upper Eyelid & Lower Eyelid Surgery

Although your face is constantly on display throughout the day, the part of your body people look at the most is your eyes.

Your eyes communicate to others a lot about your current emotional state. For example, you can often tell if someone is happy, sad or fearful just by looking into their eyes. So it is not surprising that the eyes are commonly referred to as the windows to the soul.

As you grow older your eyelids start to sag and fat deposits cause bulging around the skin of your eyes. The effect of this is that your eyes start to look tired and old.

You have two sets of eyelids, upper eyelids and lower eyelids. Generally, most people first notice sagging in their upper eyelids, as these are the most vulnerable to gravity.

When your upper eyelids start to sag they appear to hang over the eye, and in some cases, may even start to impede normal vision.

Lower eyelid sagging becomes most noticeable when you are tired as it makes you appear as though you have bags under your eyes.

As you age, you may appear to have permanent bags under your eyes which subsequently makes you look tired and as though you haven’t had enough sleep.

Fortunately, for those who have sagging upper or lower eyelids, cosmetic surgery provides a very viable and effective treatment option.

Eyelid surgery can help to remove the excess sagging skin around the eyes, literally knocking years off the appearance of your face.

Look Young Again With Upper Eyelid Surgery

Sagging of the upper eyelids becomes most noticeable in your 40s and 50s, although some people may start to develop noticeably sagging upper eyelids in their 20s and 30s.

When your upper eyelids start to sag, excess skin appears to hang down from underneath the eyebrows creating a tired look and in some cases, making your eyelids feel very heavy.

In the later case, which usually signals a more advanced stage of upper eyelid sagging, the excess weight on your eyelids may make it difficult for you to keep your eyes open throughout the day. In very severe cases, you may have to lift your eyebrows up in order to see properly.

Cosmetic Surgery Procedure

In the medical world, an upper eyelid lift is known as an upper lid blepharoplasty.

A cosmetic surgeon will first identify the excess sagging skin, mark the area using a pen and eventually cut out the excess skin in a semi-ellipse shape. The underlying muscle will also be removed, and if there is excess bulging fat, that too will be reduced.

The incision scar will be in the normal lid fold and in most cases will extend to the side of the lid. The incision itself is closed with very small sutures, which should heal leaving a barely noticeable scar.

Eyelid Surgery For Orientals & Asians

If you are of Asian or Oriental descent, the shape of your eyes will be different from Caucasian lids. You don’t have such a pronounced upper eyelid crease, but you may decide to have a “western fold” after having eyelid surgery.

Some people choose to have this western fold created purely for cosmetic reasons, even if they don’t really require eyelid surgery. If you don’t want to have a western fold, eyelid surgery will be carried out in the normal way.

However, it is extremely important that if you are of Asian or Oriental descent, that you make sure your cosmetic surgeon has operated on Oriental or Asian eyelids before.

The reason for this is that these eyelids are slightly more difficult to operate on, and therefore require a greater degree of skill.

If you decide to have upper eyelid surgery, make sure you see before and after pictures of the patients the cosmetic surgeon has previously operated on to see if you will be happy with the type of results they produce.

Look Young Again With Lower Eyelid Surgery

One common complaint that people with sagging lower eyelids have is that they keep being told by others that they look tired and that they should get some sleep.

When your lower eyelids start to sag, they also become puffy due to fat deposits under the skin and later may appear wrinkled too. All of these factors contribute to making you look sleepy, tired and old.

Plastic Surgery Procedure

There are two main approaches used by cosmetic surgeons to reduce the fat deposits, called fat pads, from the lower eyelids. What method a cosmetic surgeon chooses to use is largely due to their personal preference.

1) Traditional Surgery

A small incision is made through the skin and muscle directly below the eyelash. The fat pads are then exposed and reduced. Excess skin is removed, the incision is closed and will eventually heal without leaving any visible scar.

2) Transconjunctival Surgery

In this approach the fat from the lower eyelids is removed via an incision made on the inside of the eyelid. If all you require is excess fat removal, this incision may be all you need. If however you require excess skin removal, then you will also need to have an external excision as well.

3) The Natural Results Approach

There is a third approach to lower eyelid surgery, although it tends to be less common.

Some cosmetic surgeons believe that more natural looking results can be obtained not by removing fat from the lower eyelids, but rather by rearranging that fat around the eyes.

However, this approach tends to be less suitable for those with lots of excess sagging skin.

Eye Wrinkles

If all you have are small wrinkles around the eyes and are not affected by bulging or sagging skin, then you probably won’t require or benefit from eyelid surgery.

Instead, a better option would be lower eyelid skin resurfacing, or tightening your skin with a chemical peel or laser skin resurfacing.

Sometimes eyelid skin resurfacing is done together with eyelid surgery, especially if there are noticeable wrinkles around the eyes.