Dr Tim Pearce
When it comes to human attraction the eyes are a focal point, often referred to as the ‘windows to the soul’, they convey our emotions, and send signals about our health, age, and attractiveness to others. The face is a ‘presentation box’ for the eyes, whereby the surrounding structures serve to frame and highlight them. As aesthetic clinicians, we must aim to use a more holistic, full-face approach when assessing facial treatment to avoid detracting away from the eyes and breaking the core of female beauty.
In this blog, Dr Tim Pearce will explain the importance of the eyes, discuss the key principles of ‘catch lights’ and framing the eyes, and share how to avoid over-treatment or inappropriate treatment by understanding facial planes, shadows, and light to help you understand how to make or break female beauty.
Fundamentally, the face is a presentation box for the eyes. Looking at the planes, angles, and defining points of the face, including the chin, jawline, cheeks, and eyes, we can see an interesting pattern, a sense of framing, that starts in various layers across the face.
To draw this concept out further, let’s start with the lower face and the jawline. The jawline echoes the cheekline, and the cheekline frames the eyes. Similarly, moving to the eyebrows and peri-orbital ridge, we see another framing presentation. Light is captured and reflected towards the eyes from the upper surface of prominences or projecting facial structures – namely, the jawline and cheek.
Cartoon characters, like Disney princesses, are drawn with features that emphasise and frame the eyes, because, as humans, we want to collaborate and will naturally focus on an individual’s eyes to read their emotions and attitude towards us. Eyes allow us to assess other non-verbal cues essential for collaboration and connection like mood, health, age, and sexual attractiveness.
At the heart of many routinely performed aesthetic treatments is a design to make the eyes appear more vivid. For instance, removing lines and wrinkles with botulinum toxin will make the eyes more dominant.
However, it is also possible to ‘downgrade’ the face by over-treatment or incorrect treatment. For example, if you over-treat the cheek, the eyes will become recessed, appearing smaller on dynamic movements, like when the patient smiles. Overfilling the cheek will effectively flood the eye area and compress it; making the eyes appear smaller.
Any inappropriate treatment can have a negative result because we view the face with a relative perspective, thus if you over-treat the cheeks, jawline, lips, nose, temple, or forehead, they can all make the eyes look relatively smaller. The eyes should be an ‘anchor point’ for all facial aesthetic treatments; you must seek to frame them and not detract attention away from them.
When approaching treatment, consider the existing structures around the eye area and what is either distracting away from the eyes or aiding them. Typically, if there is no catch light underneath the eyes because the cheeks are deflated or flattened you will see less of the eye. We want to create a sense of contrast between light reflective skin underneath the eye and the immediate contrast with the lower lashes and then the different eye colour, all of which make them stand out.
If the cheek is deflated, we know we can add volume with dermal filler to increase the catch light but there is a judgement to be made to deliver the ‘right’ amount to achieve the goal, before going too far and causing another aesthetic problem somewhere else.
However, the best approach is to consider all the defining points and planes of the face when creating a better presentation box to make the eyes truly shine – a full-face approach, rather than focusing simply on injection points around the eyes.
Firstly, consider all the planes that reflect light into the eye. Typically, these run underneath the eye and are the upper surface of the zygoma and the fat pad above. As light comes down onto the face from above, these planes will form the catch light that should be reflected and mirrored in the shape of the jawline.
A beautiful female face will have a catch light under the eye, then a shadow in the mid-face, followed by another, more subtle catch light just above the jawline line that echoes the catch light beneath the eyes. This creates a framing effect.
When assessing a female face, choose injection points that enhance the point of the cheek, the line of the cheek, and similarly the jawline, then subtract anything that removes light from those areas. This may be the tear trough or the lateral lid-cheek junction, perhaps the temple which can also create a shadow around the eye. You can create the ideal presentation box, and ensure the eyes are framed by the rest of the face, by removing these shadows.
Find out more about treating tear troughs and dark circles with dermal filler.
As people age, they lose volume in their cheeks, and the catch light that frames the eyes reduces, sometimes turning into a shadow in its most aged form with depletion of the lateral lid-cheek junction. Therefore, if the patient has a defined cheek, making sure there is no shadow at the lateral lid-cheek junction is the most important injection point to improve the aspect of the eyes, making them more vivid and beautiful.
There is no one-size-fits-all and to achieve amazing results for your patients you must understand that the goal can be influenced by different angles, head positions, lighting, and make-up, much of which is out of your control. However, there is another component which you can control by looking at the face more holistically and breaking it down into the core principles.
Every face is a three-dimensional, not a two-dimensional, structure. It consists of points that define it, lines that connect those points, and planes that connect those lines. If you learn to assess a face more holistically, use the correct ratios and systematically define the right points, while also improving the connecting planes, and removing as many distractions as possible, you will get a much more vivid image of a framed face with beautiful eyes at the centre.
Many aesthetic injectors are simply taught techniques, and many patients approach practitioners requesting ‘component-type’ treatments, akin to a Mr Potato Head style of injecting with treatments independently delivered like components to stick on a face without real thought about the context of the whole face. To achieve outstanding results for your patients – making and not breaking beauty – you must learn a system or a formula that allows you to assess every face holistically with principles at every injection point that consider the context of what you are injecting.
For additional insight, learn about the features of a beautiful face according to science.
Don’t forget, if you have any questions, you can find Dr Tim Pearce on Instagram.
Dr Tim says:
“In this episode I explain several key principles about how facial features interact to create beauty, with a primary focus on the eyes and how to enhance them through treatments. The Importance of the Eyes: The eyes are the focal point of human attraction, as they convey emotions, age, health, and attractiveness. The face serves as a “presentation box” for the eyes, meaning the surrounding structures should frame and highlight the eyes.”
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Understanding facial anatomy is crucial for precise filler placement and achieving natural, balanced results. Knowledge of anatomical structures and vascular supply not only helps in avoiding complications but also enhances the overall effectiveness of treatments.
If you are eager to deepen your understanding of anatomy, Dr Tim is excited to announce a new training experience tailored for aesthetic injectors
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Dr Tim Pearce MBChB BSc (Hons) MRCGP founded his eLearning concept in 2016 in order to provide readily accessible BOTOX® and dermal filler online courses for fellow Medical Aesthetics practitioners. His objective was to raise standards within the industry – a principle which remains just as relevant today.
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