Rhinoplasty (Nose Job) surgery at Plastic Surgery Truth.com

Rhinoplasty is the right term for “nose job” – the surgery for changing the form and the size of the external nose. Rhinos is “nose” from Greek, and plastikos is “flexible, changing form”.

Rhinoplasty is considered the earliest plastic surgery. Six hundred years B.C. in India methods of plastic surgery and skin transplantation were used for reconstruction of damaged noses. Treatises in rhinoplasty were written as early as in the Middle Ages, but the method became widely spread only in the 30th of the XX century after the German surgeon Jacques Joseph was first to successfully perform aesthetic rhinoplasty.

In course of many years the operation technique has been perfected, but the very core of the procedure has remained unchanged till present. People that don’t know much about plastic surgery and have just decided to change their nose’s form often hope for some miracle – they believe there’s some high technology laser device able to reduce the nose without any cuts and lancets or they think it can be some specific injections of special cartilage shrinking solutions. At times patients even ask if we can darken the sides of the nose using permanent make-up to visually narrow it. Of course, such fantasies only make surgeons smile.

Today just like many years ago nose reshaping involves sedation, skin detaching, surgical changing of the osteocartilaginous skeleton’s form, then covering it with the skin and suturing. Rhinoplasty can be open, when the incision is made on the columella (a skin dam between the nostrils), and closed, when all the incisions are performed inside the nose.

The first way lets detach the skin so that all nasal structures and changes can be seen, the second way means that the surgeon performs some of the procedures practically blindly. Heated arguments as to which of the two methods of operation is better are open till present but there are some objective facts: closed rhinoplasty causes less damage of tissues, nose swelling is less seen and regenerative process is faster.

Surgeons often use such terms as cartilages and bones. Cartilage means tissues forming the tip of the nose and bone part is the upper structures that sometimes form nose bumps. Complicacy of the surgery justified to a patient determines the cost of the operation.

Minimal cost rate for rhinoplasty in the US is $4,000. Such price makes up for an operation nose tip. A procedure that involves nose bones demands bigger costs. The full rhinoplasty (on both nose tip and nose bones) is still more expensive. The average price for rhinoplasty is $7,000. As a rule, the price is always higher if a patient needs revision rhinoplasty.

One of the characteristic features of rhinoplasty is that it makes a patient fall out of social life after the operation. Even if the patient feels better the next day after the operation, he still needs to wear a plaster bandage on his nose. Besides, there are usually swells and bruises seen under the patient’s eyes during two weeks after the operation.

And of course one of the most important moments is swelling of soft tissues of nose. It is often that patients become depressed after the procedure because their nose looks not like they wished and expected. The swelling disappears gradually and the nose turns to its final shape in course of a year.

Rhinoplasty is a complicated procedure. It demands high technical skills from the surgeon and is psychologically challenging for the patient. Nevertheless it remains one the most popular plastic surgery operations in the world. The effect from a successful rhinoplasty can be just overwhelming. Nose reshaping is able to radically improve facial proportions, make the eyes visually bigger, give the face a different expression and open up new possibilities for professional and creative life.