The Enemy of Good is Better. Virginia, VA

I can not believe it's been over two years since I had radio-frequency done around my eyes. Everything I have learned since has told me how dangerous it is to do radio-frequency in this area because of the vulnerability here: the porousness of the eye membranes, the thinness of the skin and the eye's inability to control heat the way other parts of the body can. In my initial review, I focused solely on the aesthetic effects of the thermismooth I received, even though I was experiencing negative physical symptoms, I was still so caught up in what went wrong with my appearance. My physical pain has proved to be the real problem for me and time has born this out.
To recap, when the tech used the wand, it burned after a while. If you feel burning, make sure they stop, because it is not supposed to be this hot. Maybe my skin is thinner than average because I know by checking later on, that the settings used were the normal settings that are supposed to be used. My skin was pink and puffy for a couple weeks after and really, really dry. I moisturized constantly as you're supposed to. Every last bit of oil was sucked up by the skin. After about two weeks, there was an unnatural opaque look to my eye skin--it reminded me of a shiny fishscale look--and that has never gone away. It definitely tightened my eyes--too much--since my eyes were not saggy to begin with. Every blood vessel sticks out now so that I have a bumpy look that is very noticeable, especially near the inner corners. I equate it to when you stick something in the microwave with a piece of saran wrap. If you overheat it and pull it out, the saran wrap is sucked so tight because all of the water has been sucked out of it. I swear, that's what it seems like happened to my eyes. The reason I had this done in the first place was because I had one upper saggy eyelid. I am happy to say, that that at least WAS fixed and has never sagged since. Yay?
I used to wear eyeliner every day of my life, but in the last two years, I have worn it only two or three times. Why you ask? Well, my eyelids and rims of my eyes have been swollen for two straight years. At first I couldn't figure out what was wrong--had I all of a sudden developed allergies that I didn't have before? For a while I told myself that that must be it. Then I read about an eye disease called blepharitis and I figured that that might be what I had. I went to the eye doctor a couple of times and got prescribed about a dozen different drops not just for the swollen eyelids, but for the increased eye pain and tearing I had started experiencing. The doctor wasn't even sure if it was blepharitis because it was not following a completely classic route. He did an eye dryness test and said that that was fine, so finally settled on "unknown allergies." In the meantime, in the month after I had this done, I got my first extremely painful case of pink eye. Although this wasn't exactly classic either. I never got any of the eye gunk, just EXTREME eye pain where I couldn't open my eyes for hours at a time, and extremely red and swollen eyes. For the next five or six months, I got pink eye at least once a month, sometimes twice, sometimes one eye, sometimes both. Obviously this isn't normal and I started wondering if this was my life now... About that time, six months after thermismooth, I woke up one day and the two glands at the side of my nose that had been swollen since the procedure, mercifully disappeared. I had thought those would be permanent too, but the swelling and the little festoons that it caused went away one day, never to return. Thank goodness! But after the swelling finally went down, almost every little bit of fat under my eyes went with it. I swear, it was like I woke up one day and I looked like a corpse. Was this the thermismooth or was it just natural aging? It's hard to say--it was probably both. One thing I experienced, however, and seems to be par for the course was the lack of symmetry in the fat loss. My left side looked so much worse than the right side. I was PETRIFIED to get fillers under my eyes but I took the risk and got it done. After a full syringe was put in, it looked like I had had nothing put in at all. I had to go back two more times to get more, although the last time was just to put more in my left side. I've since had more AGAIN six months ago and my left side still looks gaunt and not right. Every time I go in, I experience extreme fear that something will go wrong, however, so I think I am just going to live with it...until it gets worse, I guess.
More recently, I have finally gotten a blepharitis diagnosis, which is the most annoying, inconvenient, irritating eye issue. Just look it up if you want to see how ugly and swollen your eyes look unless you keep up a daily cleansing routine--and just forget about wearing eye makeup, which I haven't done for two years. ): This most definitely was from the radiofrequency. These symptoms started from day one after receiving it and have been part of my life since. But the absolute worst part of everything for me has been the increasingly debilitating pain I have been experiencing. Sometimes I can go a couple weeks and I start thinking maybe everything will be okay but then out of the blue, I will start getting the increasing stinging and watering in one or both of my eyes that turns into a full-on assault of pain that can last a few hours to half a day. Sometimes the only way I can get relief is to go to sleep for eight hours. The worst part is when it happens when I'm in the car driving. I have to literally hold open one of my eyes so that I can keep the one that is throbbing with pain shut. It is the scariest thing--the sheer intensity of these episodes have been getting so bad that I know I need to go to an Opthalmologist and figure out what is going on. Again, I can not say for certain whether I would have had any of these things happen to me had I not had radiofrequency around my eyes. It's hard not to make the connection, however, and harder to believe that I might have seriously damaged my eyes. I'm fairly certain that something is very wrong with them, as I've had chronic issues for the last two years that seems to only be getting progressively worse.
If you choose to get this done, make sure you have skin that needs tightening, and that you can afford to lose some fat in this area. You could be asking for a host of more problems from the fillers that you will have to get to fix the fat loss. Also, if it burns, it's too hot--it's supposed to be warm only--and that was not my experience. Really, I don't think this is worth the potential risk to your health. Many doctors say radiofrequency should never be done around the eyes. Do your research!

I am a 41 year old woman--I was a late bloomer and never really caught up--I've always looked young for my age and have really tried to take care of my skin. I was extremely happy with my lack of wrinkles and youthful glow. All of the wrinkles I had were the dynamic kind and were always treatable with botox. I am thin, however, so most of my face issues had to do with sagging. My experience with thermismooth came about because I had one upper eyelid that would occasionally sag leaving a light fold. I visited my regular dermatologist to ask for the very small amount of botox that can lift the eyebrow and eliminate it for a couple of months. I usually always had to talk him into it though because he tended to think it gave an unnatural look. (He's a very conservative doctor, which I like.) But on this occasion he told me about thermismooth and how it would tighten that area. I didn't need to be talked into it--it sounded perfect. When I came for the appointment, I had hesitation since I hadn't even looked into what radio frequency was. I started asking questions at the point I had to sign the release and looked at all the possible side effects. I just felt ill at ease which was probably my intuition telling me that I needed to slow down. I had been so happy with my skin and my lack of wrinkles but on that particular day, I had just had my first microdermabrasion a few days before. I don't think I even needed it but vanity is a strong thing in an aging woman. Since the microdermabrasion I had had excessive peeling everywhere, including under my eyes, even though I hadn't been exfoliated there. I've always used obscene amounts of moisturizer but even so, on the day I went in for thermismooth, my skin was looking worse than usual and was very dry from the microdermabrasion. I brought this up when they asked if I had changed from my normal skin routine lately as a precaution to avoid any side effects of the thermismooth. I told about the microdermabrasion and how it had made all of my skin so dry and I felt it had made the skin under my eyes worse than before I had had it done--like more fine lines were visible when I smiled. That was when we decided to do the thermismooth on the upper AND lower lids since supposedly the treatment would tighten that area and make the fine lines better. The important thing was that they assured me that the microdermabrasion would not cause any conflict with the thermismooth.
During the procedure, the upper lids felt warm but not horribly so. It was when the technician did the lower area that the wand that they use felt extremely hot, like it was burning my skin. I should have said something because I just felt like it was more than what I was told it would be. It definitely didn't feel like a warm massage--I could feel it burning me. Sadly, I have a strong pain threshold and I didn't want to act like I was being high-maintenance. I just kept trying to tell myself in my head, that this must be what it's supposed to be like.
Well, in the days afterward, the skin around my eyes got very pink and swollen. The thing that alarmed me though was how bad the condition of my skin looked. There were SO many more lines and cross-hatched looking sections. On one side of the lower orbit of my eye there was a raised section of dead skin that looked like a burn (because it was). Once the pink wore off, the skin around my eyes turned an odd gray color, almost like fish scales because it had an opaque look to it and underneath my eyes it had almost like a jell-o consistency. My eyes now have a sunk in look to them and even a few months later you can see the path of the wand and how different my skin looks in comparison to that below it. The veins along the top sides of my nose now constantly stick out, maybe because the skin next to it has sunk in along the orbit of my eyes. I can see that I am slowly developing eye bags because the laxity of my skin has so diminished.
What seems clear is that these procedures are like spinning a roulette wheel and many different things can come into play that doctors don't consider. More than likely, my skin was thinner than it might be because of the microdermabrasion and all of the peeling I was experiencing. Or maybe because I have so little fat in my face to begin with, I'm not a candidate for these kind of heat treatments. My upper eyelids have recovered somewhat except for the cross hatched look in some of the thinnest areas of my skin, but my bottom eyes have aged at least five years--and who knows if I would ever have started to develop eye bags if I hadn't done this. I never even had an inkling of them before but now the skin directly around my eyes is so sunken in with deep static wrinkles, that I can see the skin slipping little by little and creating those lovely little festoons.
I went through a few weeks of really bad depression over doing this voluntarily to myself, especially when I was so happy with how I had been aging. I let my pursuit of perfection and my vanity take away my peace and joy. What a lesson it's been for me to look at where my heart was. I feel so strongly for all the women who have experienced trauma through elective things like this.