https://DrBalikian.com This is Dr. Richard Balikian from Balikian Plastic Surgery. Today we’re going to be talking about blepharoplasty, more commonly known as upper and lower eyelid surgery.
The eyes are the window to the soul, right? We have to get those looking right. We have to get them balanced. It’s not about making big surprised eyes. It’s about having youthful, pleasant eyes.
Let’s start with the upper eyelid. The upper eyelid skin can age by becoming excess. For that, we do an upper blepharoplasty. Now everybody and their mother can do an upper blepharoplasty if you go talk to a plastic surgeon, but there’s nuance and detail even in that.
The placement of the incision right where the skin folds over itself is critical. How far we go past the corner of the eye to get some of the excess skin can be minimized and look beautiful and hidden, not just straight across, but by going up into the crow’s feet.
A lot of surgeons remove the excess muscle right underneath the skin because it hollows it out more and can show a more dramatic result. But I don’t believe in that. I think if we remove that muscle, there could be long term problems with function down the road. And we want to make sure you’re safe for 10, 15, 20 years, forever after our blepharoplasty surgery. So I don’t really take that muscle ever.
Sometimes we have fat, and a lot of surgeons are aggressive about taking fat in the eyes because it hollows it out. But as you continue to age, it’ll look even hollower and we don’t like that skeletonized look, so we leave most of the fat behind. Sometimes there’s a little bulge of fat right near the nose there, right over the eyelid that wants to pop out. And sometimes we go and we pluck that little bit of fat out. So you have a nice concavity there. And that looks really, really pretty.
And those are the little details that go into how we can make an upper blepharoplasty that isn’t hollow, that looks youthful, that gets rid of the excess skin. So whenever we do the eyelids, whether it’s the upper or the lower, we generally have to do them together because we want things to look harmonious and balanced. That’s what looks pretty on a face is harmony and balance.
Most of the time we see patients who have aging in their lower eyelids that look like bags. And what are bags? Bags are shadows that are being created by contour changes under the eye. And they come from two things, really. One is bulging fat around the eye, and that fat is independent of the fat on the rest of your body. But it’s also a shadow created by hollowness underneath, a trough underneath, and that also creates a shadow.
So imagine you have a big bulge and a low trough. The distance between those two makes a big shadow. So our goal in lower blepharoplasty surgery is to shorten that distance. How do we do that? Majority of the time we do it through a scarless surgery. These bags under the eye, we can access from going inside your eyelid. So there’s very little risk of getting that post-blepharoplasty lower eyelid pull.
So we go from inside the eyelid. We find three little pockets of fat. We tweeze them out and we cut out whatever’s excess. And sometimes we re-drape whatever’s excess down into the trough.
So we brought the bulge down. We filled the fat up. Now we can deal with the skin. For some people, they have excess skin. And when we do have excess skin, we have to cut it out. So we make a little incision right underneath the lash line, completely hidden, where no one will see it. And it’s called the skin pinch. We roll up that excess skin, we cut it out, stitch it up. No one will ever see that again. No risk of pulling the eyelid down.
And that’s why I love spending time with my patients during the consultation to hear about you, hear about your goals, hear about the things that bother you, see pictures of you when you were younger and come up with a bespoke plan for you and get a beautiful, harmonious result.
#Blepharoplasty #EyelidSurgery #EyelidPlasticSurgery
—–
BALIKIAN FACIAL PLASTIC SURGERY
https://DrBalikian.com
MURIETTA
951-719-2950
25220 Hancock Ave STE 115, Murrieta, CA 92562
SAN DIEGO
858-230-8938
1431 Camino Del Mar, Del Mar, CA 92014
VIRTUAL CONSULTATIONS
—–
LEARN MORE ABOUT BLEPHAROPLASTY SURGERY
LEARN MORE ABOUT DOUBLE BOARD CERTIFIED FACIAL PLASTIC SURGEON DR. RICHARD V. BALIKIAN