Eyelids are the first area of the face to really show signs of age. Eyelid surgery often provides results that last a lifetime. Dr. Caniglia educates patients on upper and lower eyelid surgery procedures and discusses what options are available to patients. The procedure lasts approximately 45 minutes, and recovery is quick and relatively painless.
DR. CANIGLIA: The eyes are the number one feature people recognize most, so it's a very important feature of the face. It shows the aging changes much sooner than the lower face. So typically eyelid surgery will begin in the 30s, 40s, sometimes even younger. It all depends on heredity and what we're seeing. But the nice thing about eyelid surgery I tell patients is it's quite often, once you do it, you may not ever have to do it again, which is nice. So it is one of the, not say never, but often it is one of those procedures where you can enjoy those results the rest of your life. I mean upper eyelid surgery is pretty straight forward. The main thing there the surgeon must understand is how much skin you can safely remove. You know, obviously so that you're not distorting the eye or the eyes are too tight. The other thing important in relation to the upper eyes is how is the eyebrow affecting the upper eyes, because many times there's a lot of brow heaviness too. So if you just do the upper eyes, patients may feel like there's not enough change there, I'm still heavy. So you have to educate them that part of what they're seeing is the brows. The lower eyes we tend to operate on more when patients present with puffiness, wrinkles, and there's several procedures we do. They probably want staples and what's called a transconjunctival blepharoplasty, and what that means is I avoid any external incisions. The incisions are all on the inside, and what that allows me to do is to sneak behind the muscles so I don’t have to cut the muscle, which is the main ligament that holds that eye in place, it minimizes the risk of changing the shape of the eye. But what I do is by going internally is I re-contour the fat pads in there to get everything to lay flatter. Then on the outside, what I often do is use laser resurfacing because that'll do two things for us; it tightens the skin just as if I was excising skin, but the laser also has the advantage of smoothing wrinkles, so it does both. Because if we just tighten the skin by excising it, really doesn't help with the wrinkles. If I'm doing upper and lower eyelid surgery, it's about a 45 minute procedure, so it's not all that long. Patients recover for about an hour and go home. The sutures in the upper eyes are very fine sutures, and they come out in seven days. They can often do makeup the next day. Patients feel fine the next day. It's really not a painful procedure at all but it's a very quick recovery. If they do laser, typically they've got to wait about 10-11 days before we get makeup on.
