Wake Up!

I HAVE LONG BEEN OF the belief that a low, sultry eyelid is a thing of beauty. Lauren Bacall made a career on it! Eyes down, then flicked up, two arrows through Humphrey Bogart’s heart. You know how to whistle, don’t you? Zendaya too. These days you can find the white-hot starlet in any number of high fashion advertisements, eyes elegantly lowered to half-mast, a modern master of the “smize”—a Tyra Banks–credited invention from America’s Next Top Model, employed as shorthand to entreat the aspiring Christys and Naomis and Kates to “smile with their eyes” in a sort of purposeful, unwrinkled microsquint, transforming an image from average to alluring.

Eyes, we’ve so often been told, are the windows to the soul, the key to flirtation, to connection, to engaging seriously in realms both professional and personal. So it was no small thing this past summer when social media suddenly seemed overrun with people openly discussing getting their upper eyelids yanked up, up, and away. Whither the allure of the low-lying lid? What’s with this whole wide-eyed thing?

Perhaps this is not news. Perhaps you have noticed your face in that black mirror of your phone and it looks a little…tired? Especially around your eyes? Perhaps you do not even think of your eyes as a problem, but now you wonder if they could be subtly, strategically, slightly improved? Just me? 

Lest you think this is just some social media scheme, an eye lift, or blepharoplasty, is the second-most-requested plastic surgery in America after rhinoplasty. There’s an upper bleph, which trims back excess skin on the upper eyelid, and a lower bleph, which treats undereye bags largely through contouring, or repositioning fat.