What you need to know about non-surgical rhinoplasty

Over the last ten to fifteen years, we’ve seen a huge amount of growth in less invasive beauty treatments. Injectable treatments have been successfully used to correct mild to moderate degrees of aging. Botox® does a great job of easing fine lines and wrinkles and, when done properly, can achieve a subtle lifting of your brows. Fillers can be used to plump lips, replace lost cheek volume, and fill lines and wrinkles.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen people using these fillers in the nose- a non-surgical rhinoplasty! Now, I do a LOT of surgical rhinoplasty. But there are situations where fillers can be a nice alternative to the scalpel when it comes to your nose. Today, I’m going to tell you what you need to know about non-surgical rhinoplasty.

1) Fillers can fill in depressed areas on the nose.

Recently I performed a non-surgical rhinoplasty on one of my blepharoplasty patients. She was bothered by an indentation in the tip of her nose.

The indentation is a natural part of your anatomy. We only notice it in her because she has thin skin in this part of her nose. We filled it with a product called Restylane® which is a relatively thin hyaluronic acid-type filler. The correction was immediate! Here’s her result after two weeks:

The indentation was gone and she was super happy!

2) Fillers can camouflage very small dorsal humps.

If you have a small hump, you might not need surgery for it. By placing a small amount of filler above and below a small dorsal hump, you can blend it into the overall contour of your nose.

If you have a big hump like this, filler won’t help.

3) We can only use very small amounts safely in the nose.

If you use more than 0.1 to 0.2 mL of filler in a particular area of the nose, you risk permanent injury to the blood supply of the skin. In the worst case scenario you might even need surgery to reconstruct your nose. A non-surgical rhinoplasty is really quite limited in what you can achieve safely.

Before and afters of a non-surgical nose job using a total of 0.3 mL. It’s amazing how you can achieve big results with a little amount of volume.

4) STAY AWAY from nasal filler if you’ve already had a surgical rhinoplasty.

I have seen reports of people who had had a rhinoplasty and were dissatisfied about something and their surgeon tried to correct it non-surgically. Even when the surgeon was judicious about the amount and type of filler used, the overlying skin almost died and required heroic intervention to avoid a terrible complication. This situation is best avoided.

So there you are! Fillers can be used to correct subtle things in the nose. But there are definitely things that they can’t do- like elevate your nasal tip, for instance. If you’re wondering if you’d be a candidate, give us a call. I’d be happy to give you an opinion on what would be possible for your nose.

If you want to learn a little more, check out my video on non-surgical rhinoplasty.