Get brows that WOW!

As you may have noticed, the brow is back.  Forget the balding over-plucked look of the 90’s, the latest trend is to go full 1980 Brooke Shields and we LOVE it.  The problem is, that once you have tempted your poor traumatised brows to make an appearance without waxing/plucking/threading them the minute they see daylight (we will gladly leave the brow-shaping to the experts!), is that you may find there isn’t much room left between your brow and your eyelid. That’s not cute. And it doesn’t have to be that way.  Here are a few ways you can take your look from Oscar the Grouch to Cara Delevigne.

As with all non-invasive aesthetic procedures, there is usually a surgical solution that will give you a longer lasting and more dramatic result.  In this case a blepharoplasty is the obvious solution.  What a “bleph” (as we call it in the business) consists of is essentially removing an ellipse of skin from the upper eyelid right in the crease where your eyeball meets the bone, leaving a tiny invisible scar and the skin below your brow no longer hanging into your eyes.  The entire operation can be done while you are awake and with the right doctor you will be in and out of the operating room in under 30 minutes.  Interestingly, this procedure often causes patients to lose the deep horizontal wrinkles running across their brows because when they no longer have to constantly raise their brows to keep their skin out of their eyes the muscles across the forehead can relax and the lines diminish! BONUS!

Now for the non-invasive part:  Non-surgical aesthetic procedures are usually “lunch time” procedures, meaning there is no down-time; they are quick, easy and inexpensive when compared with surgery.  They are also almost always non-permanent and will require maintenance and in some cases eventually surgery will be inevitable to maintain the desired look.

When it comes to brows the first thing we always talk about (and where most of us start with aesthetic procedures) is Botox.  We all know by now that Botox® can eliminate the 11-lines between our brows, but using a bit of Botox we can often achieve a subtle brow lift by injecting it into the muscles that pull the corners of our brows down.  The Botox will then cause the outer edges of our brows to float upwards leaving us with a beautiful arch.  In many patients this is sufficient to give the lift they need and to redefine the arch in the brow.

A few years down the line many patients feel that the Botox brow lift is no longer giving them as much of a lift as they wanted.  This is when fillers step in.  As we age we lose volume in our faces due to natural migration of fat, gravity, smoking, sun-damage etc.    You may notice by looking at old photos of yourself that the tail end of your brow has dropped over the years – in order to have a youthful appearance the hair of your eyebrow should be a few millimetres above the brow bone (you can easily feel where yours are by having a little poke there now).  In men the brow hair often grows below the bone and this makes them look masculine.  In women it does the same and makes you look sombre, angry, and masculie, which can be undesirable.  By using a tiny bit of filler to restore this lost volume on the brow we can in fact redefine the arch of the brow and replace a bit of the lost fullness under the brow.  This gives a wonderful subtle brow lift that opens up the eye area, making you look brighter, more alert and younger!

If both Botox and filler fail to give you the lift you need, you may consider having a few Silhouette Soft absorbable threads placed to help your brow find its place on your face.  These barbed sutures are placed under local anaesthetic in a 30-minute procedure and essentially pull your brow up by suspending them from the underneath of the skin above them.  The threads completely dissolve within 18 months, but activate your own collagen as they do so meaning you can expect an improvement in skin quality after this procedure too.

The moral of the story really is that there is no reason to have droopy brows that make you look like a sad old Mr Bean.  There are a multitude of options to give you the boost you need!  To find out more send visit our website www.capeaesthetics.co.za, send us an email on info@capeaesthetics.co.za or give us a call on (021) 6833048 ext 1.