Nose surgery comprises a series of procedures meant to improve your nasal functions, the appearance of your nose or both. Allergies, a deviated septum, mucosal swelling, nasal polyps or different structural problems of your nose may influence your ability to breathe and consequently to sleep. Some of these conditions can be improved through medication, while others will only find their remedy through surgery. This explains how Nose Reduction and Nose Augmentation
Nose Surgery to Make Your Nose Smaller (Reduction) or Make Your Nose Bigger (Augmentation)
When the patient’s inability to breathe calls for surgery, the doctor will expand the nasal passage by straightening a deviated septum in a procedure called septoplasty or by just lifting the cartilage that due to aging may have drooped and is now obstructing the nasal passage (nose augmentation).
Appearance is very important for both men and women and many people undergo nose surgery for that reason. In most cases, the nose is too long or too thick, it may have bumps or an inappropriate contour, the shape or size of the nostrils (or their span) is not right and there are many other little problems for which nose reduction is the solution. There are also situations when people request nose augmentation surgery claiming that their nose is too small and a more prominent nose would look better on the face.
In such cases, nose augmentation must be done to meet the patients' needs. Augmentation is also necessary when in a tragic accident the victim lost parts of the nose cartilage and bone and nose reconstruction implies completing the missing parts of the nose and bringing it back to its initial size so as to balance the rest of the face features.
Nose reduction surgery implies an incision at the base of the nose, across the columella, and lifting the skin of the nose so that the surgeon gets access to the underlying structure. Adjustments to the size and shape of the nose may be done by sculpting the cartilage and/or the nasal bone. If the nose in question needs serious reduction, cutting through the cartilage and resizing the lower part of the nose might not be enough and the procedure must resize the nasal bone as well.
In nose reduction surgery, a specialist knows exactly how much of the nose should be removed so that it stays functional and the breathing passages continue to allow a reasonable quantity of air to pass through after the operation. If certain resizing rules are not obeyed, the patient may experience breathing difficulty afterwards.
Nose augmentation surgery consists in reconstructing cartilage and even adding bone to a nose that has undergone previous reduction surgery and is now too small or shapeless. This type of nose reconstruction surgery is a bit more difficult than nose reduction because the only way to add to the existent amount of cartilage and nasal bone is to provide material from the same patient so that rejection should not occur. Thus, pieces of cartilage from the septum and occasionally from the patient’s ear are used.
In both nose reduction and nose augmentation, as soon as the surgeon has finished reshaping the nose structure, the skin of the nose is re-draped and the sutures are done. While closed rhinoplasty is a fairly convenient method to reduce the size of a nose, open rhinoplasty is preferred when augmentation is needed.