Three things that I didn’t know were ‘wrong’ with my face

Three things I didn’t know were wrong with my face… until, in the middle of a discussion about something else, some doctor or surgeon pointed them out to me. 

Er, thanks guys!

I’ll talk you through what those three things were below, but before I do, I just wanted to say that when you go for a consultation with an aesthetic practitioner, they really shouldn’t be doing this. Rather, they should be asking you what your concerns are,  listening carefully to what you say – because what bothers you about your face may not be the same as what they’re seeing when they look at you – and then suggesting how they can help, rather than leaping in with their own views. 

It’s a bit different in my case 

I accept that it’s different for me. Because aesthetics is my day-job, practitioners can be forgiven for presuming that I’m dying to have flaws – flaws that they could fix – pointed out. And often, if it’s a practitioner who’s a pal, and they say it lightly (‘You know that thing you had done the other week? Well, they’ve missed a spot here, do you want me to just…’) I’m interested to hear, and I’m not going to take offence. But sometimes I wish they hadn’t told me.  Here are the ‘things’. 

1. A droopy eyelid 

The first was that I had a ‘ptosis’ in my left eyelid. A lovely oculoplastic surgeon spotted this some 15 years ago, and showed me how that eyelid hung a few millimetres lower over my iris than the right one did. To demonstrate, he put in a phenylephrine drop, which startled the relevant lazy muscle into action so that the lid sat back where it ought, and lasted for around eight hours. But he did kindly say it wasn’t a big problem particularly if it didn’t bother me, which it didn’t. 

But fast forward to 2019, when I launched The Tweakments Guide, and this droopy lid was bothering me a lot,  because I had started filming videos for the website and for social media most days of the week and it seemed increasingly obvious and annoying to me. By 2021, it bothered me enough to have it surgically corrected along with….

“An aesthetic practitioner should be asking you what your concerns are and listening carefully to what you say, rather than leaping in with their own views.”

2. A descended fat pad above my eye

Then in 2016, there was the ‘dropped’ fat pad just under the corner of my left eyebrow, which had settled lower down near the corner of my eye in a little bulge. I didn’t know what it was and it hadn’t bothered me, though I could see it wasn’t ideal, but once a facial plastic surgeon pointed this out to me while I was interviewing him about his work, of course I couldn’t un-see it. The surgeon wanted me to book in for an upper blepharoplasty (lid lift) and remove the unsightly fat pad at the same time, adding that he ‘just wanted to make me beautiful.’ Grrr. 

Again, I didn’t do anything about it until 2021, at an appointment with consultant ophthalmologist and oculoplastic a surgeon Dr Elizabeth Hawkes (she was checking over my eye recovery after a recent eyeball trauma) and I mentioned that one day, I would get the drooping eyelid fixed, and she pointed out that she and her mentor, Professor Richard Collin, specialised in this operation and could whip out the offending fat pad at the same time, along with excess eyelid skin. After a bit of thought, I booked in and had an upper blepharoplasty with ptosis (drooping) correction at the same time, and the fat pads came out too, with very nice results.  

3. A drooping nose tip

As far as I was concerned, there was nothing wrong with my nose, I don’t particularly like or dislike it and I certainly hadn’t noticed that it was starting to droop at the end… though I know that nose tips do tend to drop with age. 

When I was lining up to do a fat transfer procedure with the expert Dr Tunc Tiryaki, it became clear that, as a perfectionist, he was bothered by my nose and although we were really only discussing fat transfer, how it worked and what it could do, he asked more than once if he couldn’t do some really small surgical adjustment to my nose at the same time. I wasn’t keen, but we eventually compromised, with him injecting a small amount of fat into my nose tip, to perk it up, and to my surprise I absolutely loved the result.

There are several videos about my whole fat-transfer procedure here, if you’re curious.