Four months after upper eyelid surgery the space under my brow looks a bit hollow. Will it fill out or was too much taken?

Some of you helped me through the "how long does it last" panic earlier in the year, so you know I had my uppers done in May. Overall I am pleased. The hood is off my lashes, I look less tired, my sister cried a bit, all good.

But. In the last few weeks, now that the swelling has completely gone, I have started to notice that the area between the crease and the brow looks a little bit scooped out, more on the right. In flat light it is fine. In overhead light, like the supermarket, there is a slight shadow there that I do not remember having before, and my eyes look a touch deeper set. I am now worried that she took too much, that this is the "hollow" look I read about, and that it will only get worse as I get older.

Is this a known stage at four months? Did anyone else look a bit hollow before they settled? And if it IS too much, what on earth is done about it, because I am not keen on going back under.

Mine looked slightly deeper set for a while too, once all the puffiness went. I think we get used to the swollen version and then the real one looks thin by comparison. It did not get worse.

The supermarket lighting thing again! Honestly, that light is the enemy of everyone on this board. I would not judge anything under it.

More useful maybe: I took a photo in the same window at the same time of day at one, three and six months. At three months I thought my right side looked hollow. At six months, side by side with the three month photo, it looked softer and fuller. I cannot tell you why. I can tell you the mirror lied to me in both directions.

hoodedat52 said:

Is this a known stage at four months? Did anyone else look a bit hollow before they settled?

I did, a little, and I remember the exact week I noticed it, so I will give you the patient side and then the honest version of what "too much" means, as far as a patient can give it.

Mine was at about three and a half months. The swelling had gone so gradually that I had forgotten how full the lids had been for weeks, and when the last of it went the upper lid looked slimmer than I had pictured. Over the following couple of months it softened, partly because the tissues relaxed and partly because I stopped staring at it. Rested's photograph comparison is the single best test of whether something is changing, because you cannot see a slow change in a mirror you look into every day.

What surgeons mean by over-resection is something more definite than a shadow in overhead light: a deep, sunken upper lid with a sharp hollow under the brow, a lid that is tight and does not close well, or a crease that has been pulled very high. It is one of the recognised reasons for revision, and it is why many surgeons now take less fat than they used to. The site's guide to blepharoplasty risks and complications puts it alongside the other outcomes surgeons are judged on, and revision blepharoplasty explains what can be done and why surgeons wait for things to settle fully before deciding anything.

Two other things are worth knowing. The brow keeps doing what it was doing before, so the shape above the crease changes with time regardless of the surgery. And some people naturally become a little more hollow around the eye with age as fat changes, which is not the operation at all.

What I would do in your place is ask your surgeon to look at it at your next follow up, with your photographs. They have your before measurements and they can tell you whether what you see is within the range they expected. I cannot, and nor can anyone here.

Same thing on my left at around four months, and I was sure it was a mistake. Now it just looks like my eye. Whatever it was, it stopped being a thing.

Saw her yesterday, took my photos from before, one month and now. She measured, looked at both sides with me sitting up and lying back, and said the right is very slightly fuller than the left was planned to be, which was news to me because I thought it was the other way round. Her words were that what I am seeing is the lid in its final shape plus a brow that sits a touch lower on the right, which it always has, and that it is well within what she would expect.

No revision talk at all, which is a relief. She said to come back at a year if I still notice it, and that she would rather I compared photos than mirrors, which made me laugh given this thread. I have stopped doing supermarket inspections.