Stitches out on Tuesday, wedding in ten days, when can I actually put mascara and my lenses back in?

Slightly vain question but it is the one I actually need answered, so here goes.

Upper lids done last week, stitches come out Tuesday which will be day six. My sister's wedding is ten days after that and I am in the photographs whether I like it or not. Two things I want back: my contact lenses, because glasses in every picture is not the look I had in mind, and my partner wants to know when eye makeup is allowed since concealer over a yellowish lid is apparently a whole technique.

Clinic said "about two weeks" for both and that was the end of the conversation. Two weeks from what though, the operation or the stitches coming out? And is it a hard rule or the sort of rule where day eleven is fine if things look settled? I do not want to be the idiot who ruins a good result over a wedding.

Two weeks from the operation, in my experience, not from the stitches. And the lenses were the harder of the two for me by miles, not because of the incision but because my eyes were still so dry that the lens felt like a bottle top.

Makeup on the lid itself was fine for me at around two weeks. Taking it off was the part I had not thought about. You end up rubbing at the exact spot you have spent a fortnight protecting, and any remover that stings is going to sting a lot more than usual. I switched to doing a light eye look I could remove gently and left the heavier stuff until the month mark.

Ten days after stitches out should put you at roughly three weeks post op for the wedding, which honestly is a decent place to be. I looked fine in photos at three weeks. Not finished, but fine.

The counting is from the operation, not from the stitch removal, and about 2 weeks is the usual guidance for both eye makeup and contact lenses. Let me explain what each of those waits is actually protecting, because the reasons are different and that tells you where there is flexibility and where there is not.

Eye makeup waits because the incision needs to be closed and settled before pigment, brushes and applicators come near it, and because removal means rubbing and solvents on healing skin. The line itself sits in the natural upper lid crease, which is precisely where liner and shadow go, so the timing is about the wound and not about vanity. Contact lenses wait for a different reason: the tear film is disturbed after surgery, dryness and reflex watering are the commonest after-effects, and a lens on a dry, healing surface is uncomfortable and poorly tolerated. Many people find that even at two weeks the lens goes in but does not last a full day, and that tolerance comes back over the following weeks rather than on a fixed date.

For your timeline, at roughly three weeks with stitches out at six days, the obvious bruising and swelling should largely have faded, though it is normal for the crease to still look a little high and firm and for the two sides not to match perfectly. Our week-by-week recovery and the aftercare guide set out both timings in context. Two practical points I would raise with your own surgeon rather than take from me: whether your particular incisions are healing well enough for makeup at your follow up, and what to do if the lens simply is not comfortable on the day. Pushing through discomfort with a lens on a dry eye is the one part of this I would not improvise.

That distinction is genuinely useful, thank you. I had assumed both rules were about the incision and that the lens one was overcautious. Had not thought about the dryness at all.

Buy a decent pair of sunglasses for the outdoor bits of the day. Not as a disguise, though they do that too, but because wind on a three week old post op eye is genuinely unpleasant and you will be standing about outside a church for photographs.

Wedding done, so an update for the record. Makeup at two weeks, no problem at all, removed carefully with the gentlest thing I could find. Lenses were the awkward one: put them in on the morning, they were tolerable for about four hours and then my eyes had had enough, so I swapped back to glasses partway through the reception and nobody noticed or cared.

Photos are fine. One eye still looks very slightly puffier than the other if I go looking for it, which I do, and my sister says she cannot see it. The sunglasses tip was the best thing in this thread.