Heavy Brow Treatments: What You Need To Know

There are a lot of reasons why our brow descends, but typically it happens over the age of 40. Most of that is because as we age, we lose volume in the upper face. We typically lose a bit of volume in the fat pads over the temporal area and in the bony structures of the upper face. Because of this loss in volume, the brow starts to descend down the face.

The other issue we see is the issue with putting Botox in the forehead. When we place Botox in the forehead, we can treat the horizontal lines that run across the forehead and it's highly effective at reducing these. But the issue is, these horizontal lines are occurring because we are contracting the muscle that raises the brow. This means that when we treat those horizontal lines, you will find you're not able to raise your brow and that can give you a slightly heavy brow. So you've got a natural descent of the brow, but by giving Botox we're often adding to that problem.

To a certain extent, we can counteract it by placing Botox in the muscles that pull the brow down. These are located around the eyes in the crows feet area and in the frown line area called the glabella. The muscles act a little like a tug of war, as all our muscles are working in coordination with each other. So, if we treat both when we're trying to soften up a forehead, you can sometimes find a brow neutral position, but it's difficult to get a brow lift and treat the forehead at the same time with Botox.

If the lines on their forehead are not bothering the client too much and the heaviness of the brow is a bigger issue, then we usually talk about doing brow lift botox on its own and that involves treating the glabella and around the eyes. You'll get a small lift in your brow with that, typically around 1 to 2 millimeters.

The other thing that can sometimes help lift by a small amount would be to place some filler in the temple area because if you’ve lost a lot of volume in the temple, that can be contributing to the brow descent. Once again you would only get a very small lift with this treatment.

If you've got a significant hooding of your eyes, putting in Botox or filler is not going to make any significant difference, and for patients that can be a waste of money. Through consultation, we can analyse the situation and tell the client whether or not that's something that can improve their appearance.

There are lots of occasions where it isn't enough and the brow will continue to descend and it can get to the stage where the skin over your eyes becomes an annoyance, it can be difficult to put makeup for example. However, it can also get to the stage where it impairs your vision.

For people with a significant amount of hooding over their eyes and particularly with a lot of loose skin in this area above their eyes, they would benefit from a small surgical procedure called an Upper Blepharoplasty. In this procedure, the surgeon removes a very small area of skin over your eye and they hide the scar in the crease. They also sometimes remove a small pocket of fat because the fat pads quite often descend in this area as well. You'll know yourself if you notice a little pouching or if you press on your eyeballs slightly, you'll be able to see a bit of a bulging of the fat pad.

We are thrilled to be able to offer the Upper Blepharoplasty at FrownDocs now, as we have a wonderful head and neck surgeon, Mr. John Biddleston. He is able to perform these procedures with local anesthetic in our surgical suite in Stirling. This is a very popular procedure with fantastic feedback and you're only in for about an hour. It's very straightforward.

The downtime you can expect would be about 1 to 2 weeks. You will experience some swelling and bruising, but other than that really we've had some brilliant results.

Think this may be the procedure for you? Contact us to book a consultation with John or to discuss any queries.