1. The shape of my under-eyes before surgery
My natural under-eyes... I’m not sure about the hollowness, but anyway, before surgery I had no fat under my eyes and my tear troughs were really severe. So the surgical plan was to open up(?) the tightly pulled area between the tear troughs and the muscle a bit to help improve the dark circles.
And they grafted a small amount of fat under my eyes.
2. Immediately after surgery ~ 2 weeks after surgery
I barely swelled at all, to the point that the doctor was surprised, and I only bruised very slightly... so I could see the result right away. Satisfaction was at the very top. Right after surgery, more than 70% of my dark circles disappeared, dramatically. I was so happy, like, are these my eyes???
3. From 2 weeks after surgery ~ 2 months after surgery
As time passed, my satisfaction started dropping straight down... Since there was no swelling and no bruising, the effect also faded that much. From 2 weeks after surgery, the grafted fat started disappearing really fast overnight. What it felt like was, when I woke up after sleeping, I could clearly see my under-eyes getting darker and darker. Hollowness formed where the fat disappeared. No, to be precise, it wasn’t hollowness? A step-off formed. The skin right under the aegyo-sal suddenly sank in, and then from about 3 mm below that, the fat took really well and settled in a bulging way;; it became like stairs.
You might think, “There’s no way you can feel a step-off from such a small difference, aren’t you being too sensitive?” but seriously, I can feel the step-off with my hand. People around me also ask why my under-eyes look sunken...
4. More than 2 months after surgery ~
Still, I lived for 2 months thinking it was better than before surgery, but around the 2-month mark, the grafted fresh fat just... completely disappeared lol. So I came back with deeply hollow under-eyes. You might think, “Doesn’t fat grafting last longer than filler?” but I don’t think so. It could be because I’m thin. Filler is a foreign material, so it stays in that spot, but this is fat, so my body absorbed it extremely well.
The fresh fat had been lifting up the hollowed under-eye skin, but since it disappeared... the under-eyes naturally had no choice but to sink in. There’s no difference before and after surgery, so I’m like, why did I do it... Everyone else is surprised too... asking why I did it.
5. After more than 2 months passed, I recently got a second fat grafting session
Anyway, after 2 months passed, yesterday I got the second fat grafting session too. They just inject it with a syringe and that’s it, so it ended as quickly as a Botox procedure. It didn’t even take 1 minute?
I’m less satisfied than I was immediately after surgery. The tear troughs also got deeper... still, it’s much better than when I had only received the first session.
Now the key is whether this fat will also disappear quickly like the first time or not, and I hope it doesn’t, but personally I see a 100% chance that it will... The shock(?) I felt after the first fat grafting was too big. Whether it’s the first or second session, I don’t think fat will engraft well just because you do it once or twice. To begin with, the fat placed under the eyes is chopped up finely before being injected... I heard it’s hard for the grafted fat to survive. (For example, you know the organism called planaria, right? If you cut one in half, it regenerates into two. But if you cut it too many times, apparently it can no longer regenerate and they all die together. Like that, fat also needs to have a certain amount of volume so the cells can clump together, form capillaries, and survive, but for the under-eyes, it’s like they turn the fat into almost minced octopus tartare level and then pray, “please survive~”)
For reference, I have a very thin body type.
For people who are very thin and have severe tear troughs, I hope you’ll reconsider under-eye fat repositioning + fat grafting one more time.
My under-eyes haven’t changed, and I even feel like they’ve become worse,
but still, what I’m truly grateful for is that aside from having no effect, I have no side effects at all!! My aegyo-sal didn’t disappear, my eye shape didn’t change, and there are no functional problems!! And it didn’t get aggressively worse either... (It feels subtly worse, not like “oh no, what do I do?”) So I’m not that angry. I also had made up my mind beforehand before getting the surgery.
This is a surgery review for a procedure pursuing natural beauty.