Slanting eyes – Institute Perez de la Romana
The famous phrase “no one is happy with what one has” is very common in our professional reality – aesthetic surgery.
Some our patients ask us to make breast augmentation, while others just want the opposite procedure, the same happens with eyelid operations. In the East the patients want to westernize their eyes by making them rounder with the crease which they don’t have in the upper eyelid. Recently, on the contrary, there are many patients in Europe who ask to narrow their eyes.
In surgery the term “screw up the eyes” means to give to the eyes oblique inclination laterally rising it. The surgical technique which can give that shape to an eye is called canthopexy and it is a technique that is very fashionable nowadays for many eyelid surgery procedures. In the anatomy of the eyelids there are two tendons where the eyelid internally and laterally ends. These insertions of ligament are placed on the bone of the orbit where the eye is located. The cantopexy or canthoplasty are two techniques which are used to raise the lateral tendon of the eyelid and lift it to an upper position. In that way we achieve slanting eyes. The only thing that is stretched is the eyelid slit which is the orifice through which we can see the eye. Obviously, this procedure can be done for two reasons, for pure aesthetic reason, functional or restorative function.
The technique Canthoplasty or Canthopexy , from the restorative point of view, is intended for those people who have very opened eyes or the eyes which over years were fallen. Usually that can happen to older people. In order to prevent the discomfort which the air causes to the eye, the length of lower eyelid is reduced by stretching it upwards and outwards and holding it by a suture at the orbital rim. The second reason of that treatment is aesthetic and now it is more fashionable from the point of view of the eye beauty. “Slanting eye” is made by taking lateral tendon eyelid and lifts it to more higher and oblique situation and place a suture fixing the orbital rim.
This procedure is performed under local anesthesia and sedation. It is finished in one hour and postoperative period is very short. Patient is able to go home in two hours after operation. The recovery period is short as well, about one week. You can come back to your daily routine in a week.
