Man in my fifties with heavy hooded lids. Will eyelid surgery make me look feminine or obviously done?

First post, been reading for a few weeks. Fifty five, bloke, and for about five years my upper lids have been sitting on my lashes, mostly at the outer corners. Wife says I look cross in every photo. Lads at work ask if I have been on the beer when I have not. I drive a lot for my job and by mid afternoon I catch myself raising my eyebrows to see properly, which gives me a headache by the evening.

So I have been looking at eyelid surgery and my one hang up is this. Nearly every before and after I find online is a woman, and the afters all have this big clean lid and a high crease, which is great on them and would look ridiculous on me. I have seen a couple of blokes in the public eye who have clearly had something done and they look startled. I do not want to look startled. I want to look like me on a good day.

Is that a real risk or am I overthinking it? Do surgeons do it differently for men? And is it my lids at all, because my brows are heavy and always have been.

Not overthinking it, it is the right question. Ask every surgeon you see to show you photos of men they have done, not just "some results". If they have to go looking, that tells you something.

On the brow bit, do the finger test before you book anything. Stand at the mirror, relax your forehead completely, then lift one brow gently with a fingertip to where it sat when you were thirty. If most of the hood lifts off your lashes, a good part of it is brow. If the skin is still sitting there, that part is lid.

I was convinced mine was all lid and it mostly was, but the surgeon still did that test in front of me before she would talk about anything else. The ones who skip it are the ones I would worry about.

deano_w71 said:

I want to look like me on a good day.

That sentence is exactly the right brief to give a surgeon, and it is worth saying it in those words at the consultation. I am a woman and I cannot tell you what it is like from your side of the chair, but I have read a lot of these threads and spoken to the surgeon who reviews this site about it, so here is the patient's version of what I understand changes for a man.

The operation is the same one. The plan is not. A male brow tends to sit lower and flatter on the bone, the natural crease sits lower, and men usually have a bit more fullness in the upper lid that is part of what makes the eye look male. The startled look you have noticed in some men is usually what happens when that is ignored: the crease set high, too much skin taken, the outer corner lifted. A surgeon who works on a lot of men keeps the crease low, takes less, and leaves some fullness, and the result reads as rested rather than altered. That is a matter of judgement inside the same hour of surgery, which is why the photographs Tom mentions are the best evidence you can ask for.

Your heavy brows matter more than you might think. In men the brow is very often part of the hooding, and removing lid skin under a low brow can drag it lower still and make the cross look worse. Equally, lifting a man's brow too far can look surprised, so surgeons tend to be cautious there. The guide to the brow test before an upper blepharoplasty explains what they are looking at, and choosing an eyelid surgeon has the questions I wish I had asked.

The driving and the headaches are worth mentioning too. If the hooding is narrowing what you can see, a visual-field test is the thing that decides whether it counts as functional. Which of your heaviness is brow and which is lid is something only a surgeon looking at you can tell you.

My husband had his uppers done two years after I had mine, because he saw how little fuss there was. Nobody has ever guessed. His surgeon took noticeably less skin than mine did and told him plainly that a man's lid should look lived in. That phrase stuck with both of us.

Update for anyone who finds this later. Had my consultation last week with an oculoplastic surgeon. She did the finger test straight away and said I am about two thirds lid and one third brow, and that she would not lift my brows because they are where a man's brows should be. Plan is uppers only, conservative, crease kept low. She showed me about a dozen blokes she had done and I genuinely could not tell on most of them, which was the point.

She also sent me for a visual-field test because of the driving, so we will see whether that changes the funding side. The site has just put up a piece on eyelid surgery for men that covers pretty much everything she said, which my wife has now read twice. Thanks all.