Brow Position & Upper Face BalanceNewstead, Brisbane

Your brows sit at the top of your face and do a lot of quiet work. Where they sit changes how you look to other people. A brow in a good position can make you look rested and awake. A brow that sits low can make you look tired or cross, even on a day when you feel fine. When we assess your brows, we look at how low the bottom edge sits against the bone around your eye socket. Doctors call that bone the supraorbital rim. Where your brow sits against it affects how open your upper eyelid looks, how your forehead moves, and how the top of your face looks as a whole. When the brow sits well, the eyelid, forehead and temple all look settled. When it sits low or feels heavy, those areas can look different too, even though nothing about them has actually changed.

Brow concerns usually come down to one of two things. The first is the brow you were born with. Some people simply have brows that sit low from the start. We often call this a heavy brow or a low-set brow. Some people carry a little extra soft tissue along the bottom of the brow, which adds weight. For others, the brow just sits closer to the lashes than the rest of the face would suggest. When a brow sits lower than usual, the medical word for it is brow ptosis. There is a wide range of normal here, and most brows sit somewhere in the middle.

The second is change that comes with age. Over the years, the bone around your eye socket slowly loses a little of its shape, mostly at the top outer corner. That bone is what props your brow up, so as it changes, the brow loses some of its support. At the same time, the small pad of fat behind the muscle around your eye gets thinner, and the soft tissue at your temple loses volume. The forehead muscle that lifts the brow gets weaker, while the muscles that pull the brow down stay strong. The result is a brow that drops, most of all at the outer end, and it often pulls a little eyelid skin down with it. This often happens alongside hollow temples and a general loss of fullness across the top of the face.

Men's and women's brows are built differently, not just styled differently. A woman's brow usually sits a little above the bone. It has a softer arch and rises to its highest point just past the centre of the eye, then tapers at the end. A man's brow sits closer to the bone and runs flatter across. It carries more weight along the bottom, with a fuller pad of tissue behind it. Because of this, the same change can look quite different on a man than on a woman. So we assess each brow on its own terms, rather than working to one set shape.

Our Newstead clinic serves clients across Brisbane, including New Farm, Teneriffe, Fortitude Valley, Hamilton, Ascot, and the broader inner north.