How to Fix Asymmetrical Eyelids

by Dr. Lee Joo Hyuck (KIES-U plastic surgery Korea)

How do you correct asymmetrical eyelids?

If you ask any 100 plastic surgeons and ask them a question, there is one question that all of them have difficulty answering. That question is the one above. The correction of the mismatched eyes, whether it is the first surgery or the re-surgery, is very challenging and stressful on the surgeons.

There are many people who are not aware that the shape and the functions of both eyes of a person are different.

For example, when you walk, both legs act differently. Left leg is mainly used to support your weight and the right leg it used to go forward. The tracks used for running is oval shaped. The runners go in anti-clock wise direction and turn left-wards to support the weight of the runners.

When you look at your hands, the thicknesses of both hands are different. The hand that you use more has more muscles. A lefty would have thicker left hand than the right.

This applies to same to our eyes as well.

There are those who are right-sighted and those who are left-sighted. If you tell a person just to open one eye when she looks into a microscope or a telescope, there are some who close their left eyes and those who close right eyes. Not every person uses both eyes equally. The fact is that the difference of the two eyes starts from here. The two eyes cannot be perfectly equal.

If you corrected the smaller sized eye through blepharoptosis and suddenly made it big, the opposite eye would look lagged and smaller than before the correction. We call this a Hering's law. This happens to 10% of all blepharoptosis correction.

As you can see from the Hering's law, there are many things that can happen after the eyelid correction. Other problems can be caused through anesthetic or other chemicals. Therefore, eyelid correction is thought to be difficult and even more difficult by many surgeons.


1) Why do you have asymmetrical eyelids?

This may be caused by the difference in lagging eyelids. Or it may be caused due to difference in strength of opening your eyes. If you have a tissue damage in earlier surgery, such damage may cause the asymmetrical eyelids as well.

Now a days, there are many patients who received double eyelid surgery (known as Asian double eyelid). These patients go about various clinics due to the asymmetrical eyelids.

If you have a problem with the eyelids, then we need to remove some parts of the skin to balance out the two eyes.

If you have difference in strength of opening the eyes, we need to pull up the weaker side to balance out the strength.

We need to have same environment setting for both your eyes when you open them. For example, if you have a scar on one eye and not the other, we need to remove the scar and make sure that the tissue under the scar is fixed so that it moves freely.



If one eye lags more than the other, we need to find the cause and recover the damaged tissue.

If the double eyelids are different, then we need to see if there are any structural problems and balance out both sides.

2) How do you prevent asymmetrical eyelids

Do not be too greedy about the results from the 1st surgery.
Do the surgery that is recommended by the surgeon.
Do not stick to what you found on-line or the surgery that you are attracted to. Do not force the surgeon to do whatever you know or want.

A surgery is conducted 100% with the hands therefore, each surgeon has his/her own method. A surgeon would like to do a surgery that he/she is confident in. This is another reason why a patient should talk to the doctor that conducts the surgery.

If you think of a surgery just like any other shopping, then the surgery becomes something that is very harmful.

This will be the start of a very bad surgery.






These factors are more important than the new techniques or new surgery methods. Something else is wrong if the doctor says Yes to everything that you require. A surgery is not committed by a god but by a human being. Also, a doctor must think of various factors that the patient does not think of or consider. In most cases, it is difficult the match the both eyes in the re-surgery.

This post is to give you an overall idea on asymmetrical eyelids as there are many of those who want to correct their asymmetrical eyelids.

Thank you very much.