Everything you ever wanted to know about my eye lift but were too afraid to ask
Including: how I did it, why I did it, WHO did it; how much it hurt, how recovery went, how happy I am with the result... Plus a ton of before, after and even during, pics
(The story of my blepharoplasty was originally commissioned by Sunday Times Style. That article is here. Consider this the director’s cut)
On March 10th, 2025, at around 8.15am, I went into surgery, where I had a smidge less than 10mm of flesh removed from each of my upper eye areas. I did this under sedation (bliss), and in the hands of an exceptional surgeon (on whom, much more shortly).
It was my first time Under The Knife. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t momentous. It was. Nor am I going to pretend I wasn’t excited and nervous in equal measure, to have it done. I was.
The procedure is called blepharoplasty (though I’ve learned to call it “bleph”, easier to say and spell), you can get it on your upper eye, or your lower - your eye bags - or both. It is not a new procedure - it seems to have been around in some form since the early 1800s - but according to surgeons, its enjoyed increasing popularity, an uptick in demand, over the last couple of years.
I’d been thinking about having it for a while, six, maybe seven years, ever since someone in The Biz (occuloplastic surgery, not show) told me it would “suit my face”, which I took as a compliment COS THAT’S THE KINDA GIRL I AM. And because my upper eyes had started to… displease me. They’d started to look a touch saggy, in pics. A touch crepey. Time passed and Yeats passed (that’s supposed to say “years”, but it’s too fun a typo to correct), and things did not improve. I noticed how they puffed up unfeasibly, the morning after I dared to have a drink, that iridescent eye shadow no longer did me any favours, that I’d acquired a kinda pouch on each side of the ridge of my nose. I knew it was genetic and unavoidable and a really very minor indicator of my having been alive for a little longer yet, but still.
I did not like this.
The possibility of upper bleph start occurring to me more and more often. I had more and more conversations with other women, who were also thinking about doing it. Until one day, in late January, I thought “f*** it!”. And, on a word of mouth recommendation, I booked a consultation. Six weeks after that, I was trussed up in a medical gown with a surgical cap on my head and compression stocking on my leg, have a cannula inserted into my wrist, so that anaesthesia might flood my system and my surgeon might remove the offending flesh…
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Here’s what I looked like before bleph: