More on Brow lifts and the YoungVitalizer by Dr. Young of Bellevue | Seattle: This is a followup on browlifts done in a natural way.  As I have said before, aging is really a process of losing volume.  The loss of volume in the forehead, temple and around the eyes leads to the eyebrow drooping.  When someone comes in to see me, one question that I always ask is whether they want to look like how they were when they were younger, in terms of where the eyebrow sits, or if they want to look differently.  If a person wants their eyebrow to be more elevated then they ever were, than a browlift through surgery and incisions is probably the best thing for them.  If they want to look more like they were when they were younger then volumizing might be better suited for the person. Here is a picture of a browlift using our incision less technique:

Youngvitalizer incision less browlift

If they want to look how they did when they were younger, volumizing around the eyes, under the eyebrow, above the eyebrow and in the forehead and temple can do amazing things.  The loss of volume in this area allows the brows to fall lower and also the loss of volume under the eyebrow and within the area aroung the eye allows the skin to deflate and this leads to extra skin around the eye.  Usually, historically, plastic surgeons tended to reduce the tissue in the face through facelifts, eyelifts, browlifts, etc.  When you age you change from a grape to a raisin.  Hence surgeons typically made the raisin into a smaller raisin. With this approach, you can look better but you don’t look like the grape and younger in a natural way.

One thing I realized in my approach to volumizing is that one of the most difficult areas to improve is the upper eyelid area and eyebrow area.  The face is essentially part of the whole head.  I know this is like a “duh” answer. But what I mean by this is much more complicated in a three dimensional view and from a beauty perspective.  So really it isn’t a “duh” subject, if you know what I mean.  The face has to be presented to the viewer, most importantly, from the frontal view.  Hence to make a face beautiful from the front, you need to present all the features so that the face is prominently presented to the viewer.  This objective has to be accomplished given that the face is attached to the head that eventually has to proceed backward towards the back of the head.  Why is that important? Well the face has to be volumized in order to push all the elements of the face forward so that when it is seen from the front it appears the best from this vantage point.  Hence volumizing needs to pay attention to this detail.  When one volumizes the face, the lateral parts of the face needs to have more volume to push those elements forward so that from the front they occupy a prominence to present the face beautifully to someone seeing them from the frontal view.

A big question is then presented to surgeons like me.  If we volumize symmetrically in all the areas of the face, won’t you recreate what the person had when they were younger. This could be true so that you wouldn’t have to volumize more of the lateral areas of the face.  But this all depends on the particular person and how they were built.  You see, sometimes beauty is created by soft tissue or hard tissue. If it so happens that a particular person’s beauty is created by hard tissue like bone, they are more likely to hold on to their beauty.  My wife’s family is like that.  Their cheeks are made of bone and not soft tissue.  So you have to determine how much of there bone structure is still present.

How does this apply to browlifting and rejuvenating the eye region? Well you have to determine how their eyebrow is currently shaped and how they were when they were younger and what volume will get them to the past.  I usually find that most people require much more augmentation in the lateral part of the brow. But typically I augment the lateral brow 2-3 times more than the medial part of the brow.  When I volumize I usually also have the tendency to augment so as to lift the eyebrows with more of the augmentation under the brow and above the eyebrow.  See below for an example of augmenting the whole face and especially in relation to this post the eyebrow and the upper eyelid region.  “The YoungVitalizer” procedure was done for this patient below.

Thanks for reading, Dr Young

Dr Young specializes in Facial Cosmetic and Reconstructive Surgery and is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washingtonea