After<4 days after revision>Before<3 months after canthoplasty (1 week after surgery)>Before<completely bare eyes before surgery>Hi everyone! If you’re struggling because of a bad canthoplasty, or if you’re thinking about getting a canthoplasty, I hope you’ll 꼭 read my post.
- Side effects of canthoplasty A year ago, I had lower outer canthoplasty (outer canthoplasty for lowering the outer corner) at one hospital, and one eye turned out badly wrong. The common issues were scleral show - the white of the eye wrinkling when I rolled my eye sideways / the “D-shaped” look / faint visible red scar / damage to the gray line, and in one eye, as shown in the attached photo, it was completely turned outward so that the inner red mucous membrane was clearly exposed, which became a fairly major complication. Functionally, my eyes would tear up when the wind blew, eye makeup at the outer corner came off easily, and they felt dry and scratchy. But contrary to how it looked, thankfully it wasn’t severe. I also had financial concerns, and I was afraid of my eyes becoming small again, so I decided to operate only on the one eye that was obviously and unusually messed up.
I got an AS revision from the same doctor at the canthoplasty hospital three months later, but.. it only left more scar tissue and improved nothing at all After realizing that the hospital could no longer do anything for me except make my eyes even worse, I did a ton of research on hospitals specializing in lower outer canthoplasty revision.
Criteria for choosing a revision hospital- I had already picked a hospital based on app reviews on ㅂㅂㅌ and ㄱㅇㅇㄴ and ended up failing, so I ruled out apps first. I mainly searched communities that focus on side effects, such as this community and others like it, narrowed it down to three hospitals that were mentioned frequently, got consultations from all three in person, and dug through the paid hospital-surgery-review section of this community, where you can pay coins to see all surgery reviews for a few days.
In-person consultation reviews of the revision hospitals- Hospital 1 was famous for its blog posts about lower outer canthoplasty revision. They do revisions, but they recommend lower canthoplasty because revision makes the eyes look smaller. But after digging through the hospital’s reviews, I found a few cases where the lower corner looked pinched again and they had to undergo revision again. There were also a couple of bad reviews saying they do factory-style surgery. So I passed.
Hospital 2 was the one I debated until the end with Hospital 3. This was also a hospital that showed up a lot when I searched for lower outer canthoplasty revision on Google, and it had blog posts with review photos and videos, so I thought it was fairly trustworthy. The fact that they said they could revise while also doing lower outer canthoplasty again so the eyes wouldn’t look too small was pretty tempting. They also said they’d add lower canthoplasty if I wanted.
But when I looked through the review section, there wasn’t much surgery-review information, so I hesitated. Most decisively, whenever I asked the doctor something, the answer was always yes.. In short, it felt very yes-man-ish, which made me suspicious. I wondered if they were just saying what sounded good? (Seriously, during the consultation, at first they said if I didn’t want my eyes to look smaller, I could also get lower canthoplasty. When I said, if I do lower canthoplasty and it goes wrong again, I might have to get another revision, so I don’t want it, they were like, yeah yeah.. lower canthoplasty has a lot of side effects. I don’t recommend doing it either. I was like, what??) A few days after the consultation, the manager also contacted me personally to ask whether I had decided on a surgery hospital. But I thought, would a truly skilled hospital that isn’t desperate to make money really contact every single patient who comes in for consultation..? And also, they said they would not operate on just one eye and that I had to do both eyes.
And then, the grand finale, Hospital 3! This is the hospital that erased a whole year of my worries. At first, both the doctor and the manager were honestly so unfriendly that.. (it felt like they were scolding me for having had lower outer canthoplasty despite having enophthalmos, telling me not to make them explain things several times, using an irritated, frustrating tone and expression like if I wasn’t going to have surgery then fine) I didn’t feel comfortable. Still, the reason I chose this hospital was that the doctor had been at the same private clinic for a long time, had the longest experience, had no bad reviews related to surgery (even though there were quite a lot of review posts), and in the middle of my research in this community I kept seeing comments and posts that seemed genuinely heartfelt, saying they were truly grateful. And both the manager and the doctor said things like, if you do a revision and then widen the area again, the chance of things going wrong increases, which I didn’t want to hear but found convincing, so I trusted them a lot. In the end, after thinking for months, I chose this hospital.
Revision surgery method- They said they would focus on correcting the ectropion (the red tissue turned outward) and firmly fix the outer corner to the periosteum (the bone area right next to the eye) with non-absorbable thread. They said they wouldn’t restore it all the way back to the original bare-eye position at first, but would restore it to match the other eye’s size, accepting that the upper and lower eyelid margin would be slightly more open by that amount while keeping the size.
Note- They said that from one year after surgery onward, the tissue becomes stable, making surgery easier. So I had the surgery with almost a full year having passed! They said revision is possible from as early as 6 months, so please keep that in mind!
Surgery review- It seems the process was payment for surgery and signing the consent form > changing clothes > final consultation and photos with the doctor > washing my face > surgery. The surgery was done under sedation: they put me to sleep briefly, injected local anesthesia into my eyes while I was asleep, then woke me up and performed the surgery. Thanks to that, I didn’t have to worry as much about a stand-in doctor doing the surgery, but enduring about 40 minutes of surgery was still hard (They said if both eyes were done, it would take about 1 hour and 20 minutes.) That doctor, who had been so stoic, became gentle after the surgery and said I must have had a very hard time during the procedure, but I held out well, and now the red tissue at the corner of my eye is bye-bye (those were really the exact words, not even one syllable off). When I looked in the mirror and saw that it had truly been restored with no red tissue left, I relaxed and started crying because I remembered all the emotional pain I’d gone through... The nurses were flustered and tried to comfort me... Meanwhile, the doctor immediately said my eyes were going to swell, so I shouldn’t cry; it was hard to swallow the tears
Surgical result- Anyway, the operated eye now slopes down in a V shape at the outer corner, and the red scar has been completely improved. Until yesterday (day 3), I was worried because the eye angle seemed to rise a bit too steeply and the eye felt shorter, but today, after the swelling went down, it has been restored to look almost the same as the other eye! (I think I cried on the day of surgery, so it probably swelled more then..) The eye size did not become visibly smaller than before the revision, and if you look at the attached photo, you can see that it has stayed larger than my completely bare eye before surgery. Even so, if you stare hard enough, the angle of the eye does feel very slightly steeper than the other eye. But you’d have to look very closely to notice, and it was something we had already agreed on beforehand, so I have no complaints. I’m just so satisfied that the flaw in my face is gone now, and I never want a knife anywhere near it again. Until yesterday, when I blinked I felt a foreign-body sensation at the outer corner and had to put a lot of effort into it, but maybe because I recover quickly, I don’t really feel that today. The dryness in my eyes has also improved a lot. It’s only day 4, but there’s really almost no scar at the outer corner of the eye, and it was stitched so neatly that once the stitches come out, only the yellow bruise stands out and it looks normal. When I had lower outer canthoplasty before, a dark scar was left along the lower line, but that seems to have disappeared too? The only thing is that the eyelashes at the very end of the eye seem to lift slightly upward, but I think that’s an unavoidable result of the outer corner being raised. I still need to see whether the V shape is maintained until the outer corner fully heals, but since they matched it to the other eye, I think it will probably become a little rounder. If anyone wants an update, I’ll come back with another review in 3 to 6 months!
What I want to say to anyone considering lower outer canthoplasty-
1. Don’t believe the good reviews on ㄱㄴㅇㄴ or ㅂㅂㅌ!!!!!!!! Don’t believe the good reviews on ㄱㄴㅇㄴ or ㅂㅂㅌ!!!!!!!! Don’t believe the good reviews on ㄱㄴㅇㄴ or ㅂㅂㅌ!!!!!!!!
Use reviews not to look for more “successful” cases, but to search for how and how often side effects happen! In my case, even though I found the hospital by going into the posts of people with tons of likes and comments when searching lower outer canthoplasty on ㅂㅂㅌ and got surgery based on that hospital info, the effect was minimal and I suffered from severe side effects. Please throw away the fantasy that because someone in a review saw dramatic results, you will too.. And unless it’s absolutely necessary, just distrust reviews full of photos filtered through an app
2. Get surgery at a hospital specializing in lower outer canthoplasty revision After getting surgery this time, I really regretted not just going to this hospital from the beginning. Even if there isn’t a dramatic change, safety comes first, and if you ever need another surgery, you only pay anesthesia fees instead of spending money twice, so I think it’s a win. From the start, lower outer canthoplasty.. if you have protruding eyes, you need to accept that even if the effect is dramatic, scars can stand out easily; if you have enophthalmos, you need to accept that the effect may be limited.
3. Search through this community I know it sounds like I’m some kind of ambassador or broker for this community, but.. in my case it really helped a lot. Even for hospitals I thought were good, looking through reviews let me learn about side effects. And please be sure to check how many times posts were taken down by members of this community. Creepy as it is, the hospital that ruined my eyes had deleted posts twice. Everyone, instead of choosing hospitals just because they promise dramatic results like I stupidly did, please make sure to objectively check information like
!!! surgery expectation ratings, how many times posts were deleted, whether there were legal disputes, how long the hospital has been in the same location without changing its name, the doctor’s experience, and the surgery method!!!
To finish- I think it really is right to give up on perfectly ideal cosmetic surgery. After gathering information from here and there and actually having surgery myself, I learned that cases where surgery turns out exactly the way I want are much rarer than cases where it doesn’t, and I think the emotional stress, money, and health involved in that are worth more than anything else. When it comes to cosmetic surgery, please don’t think only idealistically and positively; make sure you also have a negative mindset and proceed carefully after thorough research! If you want information about the hospital where I had surgery, leave a comment. That’s the best sincerity I can offer the doctor. If you ask about the place that ruined my eyes too, I’ll tell you. I don’t want any more victims like me to appear..
Then I hope everyone succeeds in cosmetic surgery and gets beautiful faces! Thanks for reading this long post:)