It was only a few years ago that, when anyone asked Jamie how old he was, the reaction was almost universal. “Oh my God, you look so good for your age,” they’d gasp. “So young!” But about two years ago an imperceptible shift took place. Suddenly, much to his chagrin, he’d reveal the magic number – 46, 47 as he was then – and he was met with frozen smiles and a subtle but telling “Hmmm!” Or “Oh!”
“I was just looking tired,” Jamie, who lives in New York and asked not to use his full name, says. “And I feel like it happened rather quickly.” In his view, tired meant puffy, sagging skin at the upper and outer lids, and the dreaded bags underneath. Even his wife said that she thought he was looking pretty exhausted.
And so, last summer, he went to see cosmetic surgeon Dr David Shafer of the Shafer Clinic to discuss his options. Sure, he could get more sleep, drink more water, slather on the SPF, and all the rest. But those actions are mostly preventative and, even when carried out regularly, can yield minimal results at best.
There was an alternative, Shafer says: a short, minor procedure called a blepharoplasty, commonly known as an eyelid lift, or the excision of sagging skin. Gone are the days of leaving the doctor’s office wrapped in bandages, disappearing for weeks and reappearing all taut. Today, blepharoplasty is an outpatient procedure that takes just a few hours and requires only a couple of days of recovery – you could go in on Friday and theoretically be back at work on Monday (the bruising, however, may lead colleagues to wonder whether you’d been in a pub brawl). Blepharoplasty involves the removal of excess skin that starts to gather on the eyelids as our demis ages, and skin loses its elasticity. It’s a natural sign of ageing – and a total buzzkill when you want to stay – and feel – young.
“Here’s the truth,” another man told me about his decision, at 72, to get a blepharoplasty. “Being out of the game is fucked up, and it happens so quickly.” This guy – we’ll call him Walter – is a successful businessman: the kind who FaceTimes me from Panama, where he works part of the year from a beach. He found Dr Shafer through his connections as a board member of a big hospital in Manhattan. He shows me his tanned face and his spry, almost mischievous eyes that, to my gaze, seem very youthful – but not suspiciously so.
What Walter’s hinting at is the fact that, as you get older, the world can see you differently. Not as experienced or wise, but as out of touch. And while it’s perhaps not talked about as openly, many men, as they age, begin to feel it – that notion that your insides don’t quite match your outsides. “I find younger people are accepting me more in the corporate space since the procedure,” he says. “I’m back in the game.”
Dr Shafer, who runs his practice from the 33rd floor of a clean, airy skyscraper along a stretch of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, noticed a considerable uptick in business during the pandemic – especially for eye-related procedures, and from men and women. “Men, who traditionally might have shied away from cosmetic surgery or treatment, are coming in more and more now,” he says. He chalks it up to two separate, but related phenomena, both tied to the pandemic. “Men have spent the last couple of years looking at themselves on Zoom,” he says. “And people have also been working at home for two years and they want to look good when they go back to the office.” Many have been using filters to optimise their appearances over the last few years. But as our corporate overlords start to gently (or not-so-gently) pressure us back into the office, face-to-face interactions are on the rise – and so is the harrowing prospect of being seen in the flesh.
Today, blepharoplasty is among the five most common procedures he performs, and can set a patient back £6,000 – £13,000 (in the UK it’s more likely to cost £2,000 – £6,000). He says it’s worth the money because “It makes you look ten years younger almost instantly.” Crucially, he adds, it’s important to execute these things with a light touch. No one wants to look like they’ve had work done.
The human face is a marvel – a delicate composite of disparate elements that all work in tandem, as unique as a fingerprint. Not only that, it’s the most primal way in which we convey emotion and thought to those around us: the way we scrunch our nose, or purse the lips. But there’s a reason we describe the eyes as the windows to the soul.
“The eyes transmit a lot of information about an individual,” says Paul Deslandes, professor of history at the University of Vermont and author of 2021’s The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham. “They’re the way in which you connect in the first instance when meeting someone.” Deslandes says that when we talk about encountering a person, we often mention the eyes as a stand-out feature. We say the eyes are soulful, piercing or seductive, and that we can intuit something about a person’s interior life, about their very essence, by gazing into them.
Deslandes notes that our understanding of the eyes changed with the rise in the 19th century of physiognomy, a pseudoscience that claimed a person’s moral character could be assessed by physical appearance. Via newspaper cartoons and pamphlets, columnists or “physiognomists” would interpret a person’s trustworthiness or nature based on the shape and spacing of the eye, or the structure of the lids. “There was a real statement about the importance of the eyes and what you could deduce from them, and people really started to obsess over the attractiveness of the eyes,” Deslandes says.
Given the history and the mythology around the eyes, it follows that changing the eye can, in some way, alter some element of who we are – or change people’s perceptions of us. That has resulted in a slew of more extreme procedures which do not merely excise excess skin, but make more significant modifications, often with greater risk. A canthoplasty, for instance, also focuses on the outer corner of the eye, lifting it to create a “more agreeable” appearance. Daniel Ezra, a Harley Street surgeon, offers an “almond eye” procedure, a specialised version of a blepharoplasty.
There are even operations that can, in theory, permanently change the colour of your iris. The cornea is cut open, and a coloured silicone lens is inserted, or a laser treatment is used to lighten the tint of darker eyes. These surgeries are highly dangerous and illegal in the US and Europe. The American Academy of Ophthalmology warns that these procedures can cause permanent eye damage or even blindness.
Not that you need to go to such lengths for a glimpse of what these operations could accomplish. Anyone with a smartphone and a rudimentary understanding of social media can use a filter to digitally manipulate their faces – to give you smooth, glassy skin, high, angular cheekbones, neck tattoos or perfectly applied make-up. Once, patients would bring pictures of a celebrity pulled from the pages of Us Weekly to their cosmetic surgeon, begging for Brad Pitt’s defined jawline or Bella Hadid’s vulpine look; today, they just bring a screenshot of themselves, gently reshaped by the magic of the augmented reality overlays that are built into many social media apps.
I recently downloaded one of the filters that can change the colour of one’s eye, layering a sparkling blue or an alluring hazel over one’s irises. The result was unnervingly lifelike. If I had piercing azure eyes I would look like a Disney villain – more attractive, perhaps, but also foreboding, and slightly sinister. I sent these photos to my friends, who replied enthusiastically, and they sent theirs back in return, all of us trading peer reviews on our new, imagined looks. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon.
Later that night I found myself looking at my selfies again, this time more closely. How different would my life be with, say, bright green eyes? Would I be seen as more attractive? Less trustworthy? Would blue eyes make me more striking – the type of man who commands a room when he enters it? Maybe I’d be richer, or happier. Maybe the world would see me differently.
Or, like physiognomists of yore posited, perhaps something vital about my very essence would be altered. I stared into my own, fake eyes for a while longer, and those fake eyes stared back, like Narcissus transfixed by his own reflection. Eventually, I put the phone down and went to bed; it was late and my eyes were getting tired.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photography by Jackson Bowley
Model, Thom M at imm
Hair by Sharon Robinson
Makeup by Elaine Lynskey using Clé De Peau Beauté
Casting by MC Barnes
Props by Tara Holmes
