The Art of Asian Eyes

Dr. Clyde Ishii practices plastic surgery in Honolulu, Hawaii and finds himself doing a lot of Asian aesthetic surgery, especially, Asian blepharoplasty or eyelid surgery. When someone says they want to get their eyes done, what they are really asking their surgeon for is a blepharoplasty.

By Clyde Ishii, M.D
The Plastic Surgery Channel

Getting Your Eyes Done

Blepharoplasty surgery can address both the upper and lower eye lids. In the lower lids, blepharoplasty generally removes excess skin and deep pockets of fat.  In the upper lids, this surgery usually removes excess skin although sometimes small pockets of fat may be present and some fat removal may be required. However, in the Asian patient, it becomes a bit more technical and tricky.

Eyelid surgery has always been popular with Asian patients. They often look to Western models to get an idea of how they would like their eyes to look. Dr. Ishii says patients want a more expressive eye but also want to retain as much ethnicity as they can while striving for their new look. The key to this operation is to try to make patients look natural but not totally westernized.

Celebrity Plastic Surgery

Talk show host, Julie Chen, spoke out about her eyelid surgery on The Talk saying that when she was 25 and a reporter in Dayton, Ohio, her boss told her she would never have a place behind an anchor desk because of her Asian eyes, commenting that they made her unable to relate to the audience. After having plastic surgery to enlarge the look of her eyes and make them more expressive, Chen says her career began to take off.

Surgical Techniques in Asian Patients

Traditional blepharoplasty techniques, applied to an Asian patient, don’t always work and can often lead to unhappy patients. Achieving an expressive fold in an Asian eye can be very difficult. Common complications include multiple folds and even loss of the fold completely. Blepharoplasty is a very precise operation and requires a practiced hand and expert like Dr. Ishii who is seeing and working with an increased number of Asian patients.

Recovery from this procedure is generally very fast and easy since it is basically a skin operation. Although swelling around the eyelid area may persist for several weeks, bruising disappears within days, stitches are removed quickly and there is very little discomfort.

Dr. Ishii likes communicating with the patient to help them attain their desired result. He says, “The patient has an end goal and it is my job to properly understand it.”