Upper Blepharoplasty Procedure

Cosmetic procedure video of Upper Blepharoplasty  or  Upper Eyelid Correction Surgery, performed by plastic surgeon Adrian Richards at his Buckinghamshire clinic Aurora. For more information on this procedure and many others that were carry out at our clinic, please contact one of our patient co-ordinators on 01844 214362.

Hello. My name’s Adrian Richards. I’m a plastic surgeon based in the United Kingdom and the Surgical Director of Aurora Clinics. In this short video, I’m going to be taking you through an upper blepharoplasty procedure. This is essentially a procedure where I remove excess skin from the upper eyelid.

Our patient today’s got very heavy upper eyelids with excess skin. I’m going to be taking you step by step through the procedure to trim that excess skin, which will give her better vision and a more pleasing aesthetic appearance to her eyes.

So here we can see the excessive skin on the right upper eyelid and here on the left, which is slightly heavier and I’m going to take more skin as you can see from the marks. The first stage of the operation is really just to infiltrate the area with local anaesthetic, which makes it more comfortable for the patient afterwards and also reduces bleeding.

Here I am just doing the superior incision. You can see I’m using the cutting diathermy on a low level, and I use this the whole way through. Here I’m just separating the skin and the muscle layer from the underlying areas of the eyelid.

Here you can see I’m just working along towards the center, gently separating the muscle and the skin, which is in my forceps there from the underlying areas of the eyelid.

So, I’ll just on and carry that on medially. I do a little trick medially just to reduce any webbing, which is to make the incision in that area vertical rather than along the skin crease. This is a trick taught to me by a French surgeon and it gives good results in that area.

Here’s the skin just being removed. So you can see quite a lot of skin. I’ll just place it there so I can measure it and compare it to the other side.

By gently pressing here I can see the fat pad now. There’s normally a fat pad present in the inner aspects of the upper eyelid. I’m just removing it now. You gently tease it out and cauterize any bleeding blood vessels with it. There you can see I’ve removed it. That will reduce puffiness in the inner aspect of the eye. I’m just checking here that it’s been removed. You can see when I press the swelling there is reduced.

Here I am just sewing the area up. I used a subcuticular Prolene, which is a running stitch, which I am just putting in here which will slide out. You can see I can slide it either way. Then I just put in a very few 7/0 Vicryl Rapide sutures. This is an absorbable suture which will not need to be removed. It is very, very fine. It just will absorb naturally and won’t need to be removed like traditional non-absorbable sutures.

Here you can see this is the end of the operation on the left eyelid. The eyelid closes. It is important to check that it does close adequately after the operation. I’ll just put some Steri strips on there and the Steri strip will close the eye while I go over and perform similar surgery on the other eye.

Here I am just putting some antibiotic ointment into the eye there, just to protect it, and also along the incision line just to prevent or limit the risk of infection.

Here you can see the fat pads, which I removed from the inner aspect of the eyes, and the skin which I’ve removed from both sides. This will give a very pleasing result. We’ll get her to elevate immediately afterwards, put her head up, and put cold packs on her eyes to reduce swelling and bruising.

Thank you very much for watching the video, which I hope you found useful and informative. I’d just like to say a big thank you to the patient for letting us use her videos of her operation. If you’d like any more information about this procedure or any other cosmetic surgerical procedures, please visit our website Aurora-Clinics.co.uk. Here you’ll be able to see a wide variety of videos and also our podcasts, which are audio versions which discuss many of the aspects of cosmetic surgery.

Again, thanks for watching. I hope you’ll be able to watch more of our videos and listen to our podcasts.