This week, we did several blepharoplasty surgeries and had some post op questions from blepharoplasty patients, in addition to some patient consultation that led to questions that I hear repeatedly, and I wanted to kind of cover a couple of those.
One of them is “Which is better for upper eyelid sagging, a brow lift or blepharoplasty?”
There’s not a right answer to this. Every patient needs to have their surgeon evaluate their brow position and their eyelid skin redundancy. I will say in general terms that most people that are thinking about the eyelids looking saggy would benefit from blepharoplasty.
There are some patients who have had a previous blepharoplasty that would benefit from just browplasty or browlift surgery, but very few people don’t benefit from blepharoplasty that haven’t had anything done before . Obviously, and we talk about this often with our patients consultations, to get the optimum result usually in patients that are in their 40’s, 50’s or beyond, they’ll benefit from both Browplasty and Blepharoplasty.
There is some controversy about going back to the old ways with the ear to ear incision coronal brow lift or incision that reverses the frontal hairline, a trichophytic brow lift. For most of us in California, the endoscopic brow lift does is strategy that is easiest to recover from, and the technology has made the procedure relatively simple. It can be completed in less than an hour and there’s very little trauma for the patients. The recovery is much, much quicker with browplasty using the endoscopic techniques.
Getting back to the original question of “Who is the right candidate for Blepharoplasty vs. Browplasty?” Typically, we’ll take the brow and position it carefully in good position and see if there’s redundancy of the skin there. If there’s redundancy of the skin, a Blepharoplasty is indicated in that patient and then, there can be a decision about whether a browplasty would be performed.
One of the things about Blepharoplasty that makes people attracted to it is that it’s a relatively simple procedure that could be performed as an outpatient within an hour or so in the office and typically has very little recovery time.
Whereas with Browplasty there’s more like a week of recovery with swelling of the forehead and typically a little bit more bruising. Both of these procedures however can be performed as an outpatient and the combination of blepharoplasty and brow lift can be expected to be completed within a couple hours using the endoscopic technique. So the simple answer to the question of which is better is you have to see your surgeon and talk about it.
If anybody has a question that would like to about this and would like me to look at their image and help them decide which is better, ideally send me a little video clip or just send me a set of photographs with a picture of you raising your eyebrows and your eyebrows relax and I’ll be happy to get back to you with what I think are your best options.
This is DrMaas.com on Looking your Best, thank you for watching, don’t forget to visit our website at MaasClinic.com.”
