Selina Roth

Photographs were what did it in the end. In every one I looked half-asleep, one lid heavier than the other, a shadow of skin resting on my lashes, and no amount of good sleep or expensive cream shifted it. The heaviness was skin, and skin only comes off one way. I spent the better part of a year working out whether that was a good idea before I let anyone near my eyes.

What I could not find was the plain version. Clinic pages sold me a brighter, more awake face; forums swung between miracle and disaster. Nobody quite explained the things I actually needed: whether it was my lids or my brow doing the drooping, why one surgeon wanted to cut a crease and another to stitch one, how strange the dry-eyed first fortnight really is, and how many years the result would hold before my forehead caught up with it.

Babyface is the account I assembled afterwards, from my own upper and lower blepharoplasty outward, with an oculoplastic surgeon checking every clinical claim. The lived half of this is mine to give: how puffy the eyes look on day three, how they settle over the months that follow. The clinical half is vetted by an oculoplastic surgeon, someone trained to work this close to the eye.