A brow lift (forehead lift), and sometimes combined with an eyelid lift can be a simple yet dramatic change to your overall appearance.
The problem: People tell you that you looked tired and ask if you had enough sleep. They ask you if you are upset or angry. You look in the mirror and you look tired or angry even though you are not. There are horizontal wrinkles on your forehead and vertical wrinkles between your eyebrows. Your eyes seem smaller. There is extra skin hanging down over your upper lid, maybe even as far as the eyelashes. You don’t look like yourself anymore. Your external image does not communicate the internal YOU.
The anatomy: The forehead has several layers: the skin, the fat, the muscle, the fascia, and the bone. As people age, or due to their genetics, there can be a loss of elasticity. Either from aging or sun damage the forehead begins to drop this means that the skin has down over the bone. When this happens, the upper eyelids are crowded and the extra skin pushes down. It also causes hooding and skin excess laterally between the brow and the airline. Because we are programmed to not allow our vision to be obscured, there is a subconscious reaction to lift up the forehead to compensate. This causes multiple horizontal wrinkles. It also causes the brows to drop later in the day as the forehead lifting muscles get fatigued. This is why some people feel that their eyelids are more droopy or closed late in the day. They may also feel this as a pressure. This laxity may be brought on by age and sun damage or it can be simply genetic. Sacramento plastic surgeon Dr. Andrew Kaczynski has performed brow lifts in Sacramento for over 25 years, even on young people in their twenties with great improvement.
The solution: When something falls, the solution is to lift it. When the brow falls the solution is a brow lift. This can be done in several ways. The original traditional brow lift was called a coronal brow lift. This involved an incision across the top of the head from ear to ear and was more surgery than most people wanted. In my practice, this has been largely replaced by the endoscopic brow lift. With this procedure, several small incisions are made behind hairline. An endoscopic television camera is placed inside these incisions and the rest of the surgery is done by releasing the forehead from the bone pulling it up and reattaching it at the proper level. Occasionally in people with very high foreheads a hairline brow lift is performed so as to not raise the hairline excessively and make people look like they’re bald. The brow lift is an outpatient procedure performed at our state-of-the-art surgery center at Advanced Concepts in Plastic Surgery in Sacramento and has minimal discomfort with the occasional headache the first day postoperative. Downtime is one week because there may be some swelling and bruising. Sutures are removed at one week and at that point, people can get back to work. It is usually two weeks until light exercise and four weeks until the full recovery for exercise.
Brow Lift Before & After Pictures
