Have you noticed that your eyes look tired as you get ready in the morning, even though you’re well-rested?

When you head to the office, do your colleagues only reaffirm what you were seeing?

“Are you tired? You look really tired. Are you feeling okay?” they ask.

Sure, their intentions might be good, but you’re not tired! So what’s making you seem that way?

It’s that crepey (not creepy!) skin under your eyes. The loose skin under your lower eyelid tends to sag and make bags — especially when there is more fluid. In the morning, when you’re retaining more water, or after you’ve eaten a lot of salt, you notice bags under your eyes. And you don’t like it.

Crepey skin makes you look tired and old. And frankly, you’re not. It’s not the way you feel, and it’s certainly not how you want others to see you!

You’re in the workforce with young and energetic people. And you’ve got energy too — you just don’t look like it. If you’re ready to restore your youthful appearance, here’s how to get rid of crepey eyelids and start looking the way you feel!

How to Fix Crepey Skin Under Your Eyes

When you’re ready to get rid of those bags under your eyes, start with a consultation. Ask a professional if you need eyelid surgery or if there are noninvasive means to improve the skin. Surgery is an extremely effective way to remove crepey skin. For some, their condition has come to the point that nonsurgical treatments won’t work so surgery is their best option.

But for many patients, the problem isn’t that bad. Instead, they can opt for a nonsurgical fix to fill and tighten loose skin.

1. Tighten the Skin

Our first step is to use a device to tighten the skin. These treatments deliver energy under the skin. Think about what happens when you put a chicken breast on the grill — it shrinks up. Your skin works in a similar way. As we add energy to the tissue, we cause the skin to contract.

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Since we’re adding energy to living tissue, not only do we cause an immediate contraction (like the chicken breast), but we also trigger ongoing collagen production. The treatments cause fibroblasts to produce more collagen and tighten the skin. That is how collagen works when we have an injury and a scar forms. Because of collagen, the scar continually tightens, shrinks, and pulls the skin together so that the skin closes. With our treatments, we produce a controlled injury to the skin so it will tighten over time. Then you see continual improvement over several months.

There are two main options for this kind of tightening. Radio-frequency heating devices, like Pellevé, deliver energy to surface-level skin. These treatments are relaxing — it’s a warming sensation on the eyes that most people really enjoy. And they work great to improve mildly sagging skin right around your eyes.

Source: Pellevé

The other device we use, is called Ultherapy. This treatment uses a focused ultrasound to deliver energy deep under the skin. It’s painful, but it’s more long-lasting. And it targets deeper tissue, so it produces results that last for years.

Some people choose to do both procedures — one for the superficial sagging skin and the other to target the deeper layers.

Related: Forget the Facelift: Tighten and Lift Facial Skin With Ultherapy

2. Fill It In

After you’ve tightened the skin, lifting and filling the skin helps erase those dark places. As you age, your skin thins and you lose volume in your face. Hence, we need to restore the volume that was once there. The under-eye area looks darker because we can see the ligaments through thin skin. So we lift the skin up off the ligaments by putting in a filler. We use hyaluronic acid filler along the bone that surrounds the eyes to lift the skin.

With this two-step approach, we tighten the skin to get rid of the sagginess, then we give it the volume it’s lost over time. And that has a big impact!

None of us want to look old and tired. So, if the crepey skin under your eyes is making you look worse than you feel, visit your dermatologist for a consultation. The earlier you fix your sagging skin, the smaller the procedure you’ll need. If you wait until it worsens, it could be too late for a noninvasive treatment, leaving you with a bigger bill from the plastic surgeon.