Everything you need to know about rhinoplasty for men

Guys, let’s talk. In our society, most facial plastic surgery clients are women. But it’s okay to want to look better. In my practice, the most common reason men come to see to me is to talk about their noses. Many have old injuries; they want to straighten their noses and breathe better. Some want to make a bump go away. And some want to change the appearance of the end of their noses.

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, there were 233,000 rhinoplasties in 2016, but only 55,000 were done on men.(1) The disparity between the sexes can be partially explained by women’s greater interest in cosmetic procedures in general. But some men worry that a nose job might feminize them. Indeed, many rhinoplasty techniques can make a nose smaller and more feminine.

Well guys, fear not! We’re going to look at two identical noses, one on a man and the other on a woman, to help understand male rhinoplasty.

These noses have similar problems: droopy nasal tips and moderately large bumps on their nasal bridges.

The ways that we fixed the issues were quite different. Why?

1. Dudes are meant to have big noses. Men are bigger than women. We have bigger faces and bigger features. Strong facial features are considered masculine and we need to keep them that way! In male rhinoplasty, we want to refine a nose’s features, but we don’t want to dramatically change the size.
2. Men have thicker skin than women. This means that the subtle refining maneuvers that can take a woman’s nose from a B+ to an A, probably won’t work in a man.
3. Men tend to be taller than women. When we’re looking at tip rotation, you never want to overly rotate the nasal tip- people will be looking up your nostrils and you’ll look like you have a pig nose. Not good. Women can tolerate more tip rotation because they tend to be shorter and people aren’t looking up at their noses.

Okay, here’s what we came up with:

You can see that we removed the bump on her nose and elevated her tip. It looks like a nice, feminine nose.

You can see that we removed the bump on his nose and we made his tip less droopy. But we maintained a masculine angle between his nose and his lip. This guy is 6′ 2″ and it would have been really easy to overdo it and people would be staring up his nostrils.

Male rhinoplasty and female rhinoplasty are different! If you’re a man considering a nose job, ask what proportion of the surgeon’s patients are men. Check before and afters. And remember: dudes are meant to have big noses!

Citations:

1. 2016 Plastic Surgery Statistics Report. American Society of Plastic Surgeons. https://www.plasticsurgery.org/documents/News/Statistics/2016/cosmetic-procedures-men-2016.pdf