Jim in Sandy Isle:   I went for a consult for rhinoplasty, that’s nose reshaping, and the doctor I saw wants to use cartilage from my ear to build the bridge of my nose. Is that normal?

Dr. Salzhauer:  We’re talking trying to focus today’s show on male plastic surgery, because father’s day is around the corner. We talked about ginocomastia, that’s breast growth in men, we talked about liposuction, we talked a little bit about rhinoplasty, we’ll get to chin surgery and upper eyelid surgery this show as well. The answer is possibly. It depends on the situation. But not uncommonly, if men - sometimes a nose can be too small for a man. Some men come in and they have bigger noses they want made smaller, and some men come in and they have small noses, flat bridges to the nose, and they want them built up to balance and make their face look more proportional. And the way we do that is to take cartilage. And the cartilage can come from a number of places. The most common is from your septum. That’s the middle of your nose. If you put your fingers into either nostril and squeeze them together, that piece in the middle is called the septum. And the septum is made of some very thick, strong cartilage. And cartilage when it’s put in the body does not reabsorb very fast. It stays there practically forever. Your body continues to nourish it. So it’s a good way to augment and build up areas of the body and face that need building up. So usually, my choice is to take cartilage from the septum, the middle part of the nose. Now occasionally, there’s not enough septum. Maybe the patient has had surgery already, and that cartilage is gone. And then you can start looking at other places in the body where you have extra cartilage, like the ears. And you can actually take out a pretty big percentage of your ear cartilage, and without leaving a scar that’s that noticeable. So the ear is a great place to take tissue to build up the tissue for the bridge of your nose. So my answer to Jim is yeah, it could be fine. My first choice, though, for building up the bridge of the nose is the septal cartilage. A third place you can go is to your ribs. Your rib cages have a lot of extra cartilage along the bottom parts of it. And that cartilage tends to be abundant and very strong, although it might be a little riskier and a little more painful to harvest from there. It’s a good way to build up the bridge of the nose. And then a 4th way is just to use some filler materials like Radiesse that are like calking basically that you inject into the nose to build up the area.  We did an African American model, a few months ago, I remember. She wanted her nose built up a little bit. And we took cartilage from her septum, and I believe from her ear as well, and we used both the areas. And she came out beautiful. She’s happy and it really depends on how much a deficit you have in your nose where the cartilage comes from.  I do want to talk a little bit about chin augmentation for men, because that’s another very popular procedure. Having a weak chin can be a hindrance for guys in what it can make their nose look more prominent, and also tends to make a guy look less masculine. And less aggressive. And in the business world, you might notice that the top sales guys and CEOs and what not, they tend to have pretty strong chins. There’s some kind of subconscious primal visual cue that when you see a guy with a strong chin, he looks more aggressive and more powerful. And so chin implants can correct a deficient chin, or a weak chin. It’s safe, and very effective.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Cartilage Transfer, Men, Rhinoplasty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.