I’ve long believed that a low, sultry eyelid is a thing of beauty. Lauren Bacall made a career out of it! Eyes down, then up, two arrows through Humphrey Bogart’s heart. You know how to whistle, don’t you? Zendaya too. These days you can find the white starlet in many high-fashion ads, eyes elegantly lowered to half-mast, a modern master of the “smize”—an invention credited to Tyra Banks by America’s Next Top Model, it was used as shorthand to implore would-be Christys and Naomis and Kates to “smile with their eyes” in a kind of purposeful, wrinkle-free micro-strabismus, turning an image from mediocre to alluring.
The eyes, we are so often told, are the windows to the soul, the key to flirting, connection, serious engagement in professional and personal areas. So it was no small thing last summer when social media suddenly seemed awash with people openly discussing pulling their upper lids up, up and away. Where is the charm of the low cap? What’s up with all this? with wide eyes thing?
Maybe this isn’t news. Maybe you’ve noticed your face in that black mirror of your phone and it looks a little…tired? Especially around your eyes? Maybe you don’t even think of your eyes as a problem, but now you’re wondering if they could be subtly, strategically, slightly improved? Only me?
Lest you think this is just some social media scheme, eye lift, or blepharoplasty, is the second most requested plastic surgery in America after rhinoplasty. There is an upper lash, which removes excess skin on the upper eyelid, and a lower lash, which addresses bags under the eyes largely through contouring or fat repositioning.
The blepharoplasty procedure known as double eyelid surgery, or upper eyelid crease surgery, has been the most commonly performed cosmetic procedure in Asia for decades and was invented by a Japanese surgeon named Kotaro Mikamo in 1896. The surgery has long been considered a attempt to transform an Asian eye into a more Western one. But as Elise Hu, author of the new book Flawless: Appearance and Culture Lessons from K-Beauty Capital, he notes, at the time the process was developed, Western influence in Japan was relatively small. Mikamo himself stated that his aim was to emulate the “Japanese ideals of beauty established by ukiyo-e artists and novelists”. As Hu told me in an email: Mikamo “said he wanted to open the eyes to make them look more ‘cute’. “
Whatever the historical basis of the surgery, the number of people of all backgrounds who desire some type of blepharoplasty is increasing. Robert Schwarcz, a double board-certified ophthalmic plastic surgeon, tells me he has performed 40 to 50 blepharoplasties a month for the past 15 to 20 years, usually on patients 40 and older. In recent years, however, there has been a marked increase in patients in their 30s coming in for visits. He suspects it had a lot to do with the grid setting in Zoom. “Now you’re comparing your face to your colleagues, even though you’re supposed to be doing work,” she says. A Hollywood makeup artist friend tells me she’s noticed the upper lid stretching on many of her clients, including some very famous faces. “You’d never notice if you didn’t do their makeup,” she says. “They left for a short vacation and came back looking…exceptional.“
It helps that the natural fold of the eyelid tends to camouflage any potential scarring and that, compared to the downtime required by, say, a facelift, the recovery period is relatively short. “People really want results where no one can tell they had anything done,” ophthalmic plastic and reconstructive surgeon Kami Parsa tells me in his Beverly Hills office, where his services have a year-long waiting list. The bleph is “a water kind of thing,” Schwarcz says, and while earlier in his career he might have told someone in his 30s to come back in 10 years, now he’s more adept at listening to what they’re looking for. The eyelid, he tells me, is the frame of the eye: “If you have two pictures side by side and the frames don’t look the same, it doesn’t look right.” What Parsha calls “continuous, soft mechanical trauma” and I call being alive—putting on your makeup, taking it off, washing your face, rubbing your eyes—can take a toll on the most thin body skin. And Parsa notes that, as with any kind of baggage, some people are genetically predisposed.
