There's a word plenty of people meet at eleven at night, decide it sounds far too serious for anyone like them, and close the tab on. It's blepharoplasty, and it deserves a calmer read than that, because the thing it describes is a good deal plainer than the word makes it sound.
What blepharoplasty actually is
Start with the word, since it's doing you no favours. Blepharon is Greek for eyelid, and plasty means shaping. Eyelid shaping, and that really is the whole translation. Everybody outside a clinic calls it eyelid surgery or an eyelid lift, which is what we'll call it for most of this page.
Here's what it's for. As the years go by, the skin above your eyes can droop and sag into a hooded appearance, and the skin below can settle into the bags that make up that classic tired look. Surgery to correct either of those is blepharoplasty, and it is most commonly performed under local anaesthetic.
The thing that sets it apart from everything else offered for droopy eyelids is what it does about the skin itself. It takes the surplus fold away. Every other treatment works with the skin you have, and this is the one that removes some of it, which turns out to be the whole reason the operation exists at all.
Why no injection can remove skin
This next part is worth having straight before you go shopping, because it saves a great deal of hopeful spending.
There are two injections people ask us about for the eye area, and each of them does exactly one thing. A filler puts volume in. An anti-wrinkle injection asks a muscle to ease off pulling. Both are genuinely useful things to do around your eyes, and neither one can take a single millimetre of skin off your eyelid, because a needle has no way of removing skin at all.
Picture a shelf holding more books than it was built for. You can push them tighter together. You can lift the whole shelf higher up the wall, so the ones leaning out over the edge aren't hanging in front of your face any more. Stand back after either of those and there is exactly the same number of books as when you began.
Your upper eyelid has a small span to work with, brow at the top and lashes at the bottom. When there's more skin than that span will hold flat, the surplus has to go somewhere, and it goes forward and down as a fold. Tightening the skin gathers it in, which is the books pushed together. Raising the brow takes the whole lot up by millimetres and carries the overhang out of your way, which is the shelf moved higher. Neither of them has taken a book off the shelf, and that is the only thing that ever changes the count.
Now, working with the skin you already have is very often completely sufficient, which is the cheerful half of this. A shelf that's only slightly overfull settles beautifully once the books are pushed together, and that is roughly what our non-surgical eye lift does. Plexr tightens and retracts the excess eyelid skin with no cutting and no stitches, and for suitable patients it's designed to give results comparable to the surgical alternative. We've told that side of the story properly in hooded eyes without surgery, and for a great many people it's where the whole question ends.
Where there is a good deal more skin than the span will ever hold, no amount of pushing settles it. That's the point at which blepharoplasty stops being the drastic answer and becomes the accurate one.
Upper eyelid surgery and lower eyelid surgery
These two get talked about as one thing, and they're separate complaints that happen to be neighbours.
Upper eyelid surgery deals with the hood, the skin above the eye that has drooped and sagged forward across the lid. Lower eyelid surgery deals with what settles beneath, the bags that read as tiredness whatever sort of night you've had. People arrive describing one and pointing at the other more often than you'd guess, which is nobody's fault at all; they sit either side of the same eye, and both of them make you look worn out.
One distinction is worth carrying with you. If what sits under your eye comes forward as a bulge, that's a question about shape. If it sinks back as a groove and casts a shadow, that's a different story with a different answer, and it has a piece of its own in why you look tired when you're not. Telling those two apart in a bathroom mirror is genuinely difficult, and it's one of the first things a proper look settles.
Who an eyelid lift genuinely suits
After enough of these conversations, two descriptions come round more than any others.
The first is the hood that has reached the top edge of what you can see. You'll recognise it by what you've started doing without ever deciding to: lifting your brows to read something, raising them at the wheel, holding them up through a long afternoon and wondering later why your forehead aches. Once skin has come far enough down to be in the way of something, it has stopped being a thing you look at and become a thing you look past.
The second is the fold your eye makeup vanishes into. Colour goes on the lid, your eyes open, and it's gone, so the only person who ever sees it is you, in the few seconds before you open them. A lot of people quietly gave up on that part of getting ready years ago and never mentioned it to anybody, and it's a perfectly good reason to ask a question.
There's a third worth naming as the one to be careful about, because it sends people toward the wrong treatment. If your eyes read tired and the thing that has actually changed is where your brow sits rather than the skin on your lid, then removing skin was never going to be the answer. Brows are moved by muscle rather than by skin, and we've written that up in the Botox brow lift. Plenty of faces have some of each going on, which is entirely ordinary, and it's an easy thing to sort out once somebody can watch your brows move.
Why the surgeon looks before anything is decided
Broadway Retreat is a CQC-registered clinic, and the surgical suite sits under the same roof as everything non-surgical we do. That arrangement is worth understanding, because it changes what you're likely to be told when you ask.
We provide a wide range of non-surgical treatments, and there will always be occasions where the change somebody wants is beyond what those treatments can achieve. Since we offer both, we have nothing whatsoever to gain by pointing you toward one rather than the other, so the recommendation you get is the one your eyes are actually asking for. That's the only sort worth having.
The shape of it is straightforward. The surgeon examines your eyes, listens to what you want changed, and tells you honestly whether surgery or something less invasive will serve you best. Nothing is decided before that conversation, and nothing goes ahead until you've decided it. Our surgical treatments are performed by surgeons and tailored to you, and that's the thing we'd want you asking about wherever you went.
The things this page won't tell you
Now the part where we stop, because there's a line between explaining a procedure and pretending to have examined you.
You will find pages that tell you exactly how your operation would go, precisely what your recovery would ask of you, and what your eyes would look like at the end of it. We won't, and here's why. None of those questions has a general answer. Each of them is an answer about one particular pair of eyelids, and yours haven't been looked at yet, so anything written here about your recovery would really be a description of somebody else's.
What can honestly be said from a page is a short list. Blepharoplasty is most commonly performed under local anaesthetic. It's carried out by surgeons, in a CQC-registered clinic on Broadway in Manchester. And every specific thing you actually want to know belongs to the consultation, where somebody can look at your eyelids while they answer it.
Come and ask about your eyelids
Here's the bit people don't quite believe until they've done it: asking commits you to nothing. A consultation is a conversation. You say what's been bothering you, somebody examines your eyelids properly and tells you what's genuinely going on, and then you go home and think about it for as long as you like. If surgery isn't the right answer for your eyes, you'll hear that just as plainly, along with what is.
Arrange your consultation and bring the eyelids with you. And if it turns out you've spent years holding your brows up without ever noticing, you'll rather enjoy finding out why.