One of the first requests I get from patients seeking facial rejuvenation is Botox injection to the forehead to get rid of the horizontal lines on the forehead. Even though most of the patients are happy with the disappearance of their lines, after a while they start complaining that now their eye-brows have drooped. This is due to the fact that when our brows start drooping and become heavier, naturally we try to compensate for it by elevating them and thus creating wrinkles and lines in our forehead. As Botox paralyzes the forehead muscles we cannot compensate for the brow droop anymore. The heavy eye-brows push the eye-lids even further down and give us the “tired” and “unhappy” look.
The only effective and long term solution to the above described problem is a true surgical endoscopic brow-lift which is performed with small incisions that are placed in areas of the head covered by hair (also referred to as: “invisible incisions”). The forehead muscle and hence the eye-brows are then lifted using a high-definition miniature camera and laser instead of conventional metal blades. This not only minimizes bleeding and traumatic injury to the tissues during surgery but it also causes significantly less swelling and bruising post-operatively.
With the current trend in cosmetic surgery, more and more patients are seeking non-surgical solutions for facial rejuvenation. As many of them (ie. Botox, dermal filler, chemical and laser skin resurfacing) have their indications, the example above demonstrates clearly that sometimes trying to avoid surgery at any cost can create more unwanted problems and disappointment.
Too often I see women plucking their eye-brows higher and higher or even tattooing their eye-brows in order to compensate for their dropping brows and too many times this gives them the surprised or angry look that looks unnatural.
In my opinion, if the right surgery is performed at the right time, you will get the most natural and longest lasting result without anyone knowing that you ever had surgery.
The patient below is a good example of a young lady that was complaining of her heavy eyebrows covering too much of her eye-lids and thus making it difficult to apply her eye-shadows. This patient also had a midface-lift in combination with her brow-lift with only two added incisions inside her mouth (hidden) to facilitate this. Please note a more visible upper eye-lid as well as more cheek-bone definition due to the midface-lift.
For more question please visit our Endoscopic Brow-lift questions page.