If you’ve been looking at yourself in the mirror lately and thinking about how dark, loose, or hooded your eyes appear, you’re not alone. Even if the rest of your face is weathering the aging process well, your eyes are often the first to truly show their age. This is when blepharoplasty, or eyelid lift surgery, can come in handy.

The Benefits of Blepharoplasty

Blepharoplasty is a personalized procedure that rejuvenates the upper, lower eyelids, or both using minimal techniques that provide virtually no scarring. It’s often used to remove excess sagging skin that contributes to a dark,  tired or sagging appearance to the eyes as well as reposition structures beneath the skin to a more youthful position.

In this way, blepharoplasty rejuvenates the eyes, helping people look more alert, younger, and even more happy in some cases.

Upper Blepharoplasty vs. Lower Blepharoplasty

Because the surgeries can be performed separately, some patients opt to do one over the other. This is beneficial some of the time, but only certain candidates for blepharoplasty will truly benefit from just one procedure. Here’s what you can look for when deciding whether you need upper, lower, or both.

Upper Eyelid Surgery

The number one characteristic that reveals you can benefit from an upper eyelid lift is a heavy or hooded appearance to your eyes. This is distinct from a heavy brow, which appears when the forehead skin sags and the brows create a furrow at the top of the nose.

Two things to look out for include whether you’re finding it difficult to apply makeup to just your upper eyelids – it might be rubbing off on other parts of the skin in the area – or if it looks like your eyes are getting smaller. In severe cases where upper blepharoplasty is used, people begin to lose their peripheral vision due to skin obscuring their vision.

Upper eyelid surgery is almost universally simple to recover from and is a less extensive procedure than lower blepharoplasty. In fact, the procedure is in office and takes less than an hour!

Lower Eyelid Surgery

If your eyes look heavy, tired, or have perpetual dark circles regardless of how alert you feel, lower eyelid surgery might be for you. When these are your only concerns about the appearance of your eyes, you are typically younger than someone considering upper blepharoplasty or both, although again, everyone has different needs and concerns for these procedures.

Lower blepharoplasty typically results in more dramatic changes to a person’s look, while still looking natural and being a simple surgery to recover from.

When You Should Consider Both

All that said, most patients do need both, usually because our typical eyelid surgery patients at FacesFirst are in their middle- to upper-middle-age range, and therefore have concerns about both their upper and lower eyes. However, younger patients with specific severe concerns might benefit exclusively from one surgery rather than two.

Older patients are also typically more likely to undergo both eyelid procedures and/or combination facial surgery to limit the total number of surgeries they have over their lifetime. These combination procedures often include a brow lift to remove frown lines or forehead wrinkles, as well as fat transfer to the undereye area for a more full, youthful appearance.

Eyelid Surgery in Denver, Lone Tree CO

There are myriad concerns and multiple ways to address them through surgical and non-surgical facial rejuvenation techniques, and the physicians at FacesFirst, Dr. Nicolette Picerno and Dr. Christopher Cote, are here to help you understand how you can achieve a more satisfying appearance. If you think you might be interested in eyelid surgery, don’t hesitate to request an appointment at FacesFirst today. We’ll walk through your concerns and how best to address them both immediately and for years to come.