Nose wing sculpturing surgery

In the developing of rhinoplasty surgeries, the nose wing sculpturing surgery falls relatively behind. The reason is that people's concept about rhinoplasty surgery in the past was all about increasing the height and length of the nasal dorsum. The nose wing, meanwhile, mostly needs to be reduced. Coupled with the previously poor nose wing reduction surgery techniques resulting in poor surgical outcome, the patients often complained that the nose wing would "bounce back again." Therefore, everyone has intentionally or unintentionally ignored about the importance of the nose wing.

The beautifulness of the nose wing is as important as that of the nose tip. Think about it, is there any artist or celebrity having “big” or “wide” nose wings"? Deliberately ignoring the shape of the nose wing will make the nose-sculpturing surgery unsuccessful.

In the past, the reason for the poor postoperative effects of nose wing surgeries was the sole emphasis on skin resection, coupled with the fact that the muscle around the nose wing would pull the nose wing outward, further reducing the effect of the nose wing reduction. Therefore, the repositioning of the muscles beneath the nose wing is the key to successful surgery.

A good-looking nostril looks like a dropping waterdrop shape from below. The approach of surgery also is to work toward this direction. In short, a bad-looking nostril most likely has some of the below problems: (see figure)

The ideal shape of nostrils is the raindrop that goes outwards, and the size of the nose wing is within the vertical line of nasal angle of the eyes. Looking from below, the proportion of the distance between the nose tip to the upper edge of the nostril and the distance between the upper edge of the nostril and the base of the nose wing is 1:2.

In general, nose wing surgery does not only solve the single above-mentioned problems. In clinical practice, it often should solve two or more problems at the same time, so it requires a composite incision. For example:

The disadvantage of nose wing surgery is that the surgical scars might expose when correcting the overly-large or overly-wide nose wing. However, according to our long-term and numerous case tracking, most of the scars are not obvious, and there are not many cases where scar removal surgery is needed. Furthermore, scars can mostly be hidden at the junction between the nose wing and the face so others cannot see them clearly. Of course, the key for a successful surgery is the preoperative judgment. Clinically we still see many cases where the surgeons cut too much or too little nose wing, so nose wing is not a very simple operation.

The nose wing also plays an important role in nose-sculpturing surgery! In some cases, it is better not to do nose-sculpturing surgery if the patient does not fix the nose wing at the same time. Most cases with overly-large nose wing have problems such as large nose tip, sagging nose tip and so on, so the nose wing reduction surgery is rarely performed alone.

The above is purely a case description, and the actual situation will vary from person to person.

The difference between these cases and the previous ones is that some people have enough length on their noses but have problems with overly-exposed nostrils or retracted nose wing. For such cases the surgeons need to pull the nose wing outwards. (The above is purely a case description, and the actual situation will vary from person to person.)

The importance of nose wing surgery in nose-sculpturing surgery can be seen from the above cases. The ultimate goal of nose wing surgery is to reduce the exposure of the nostrils, reduce the width of the nose wing and control the relative positions of the nose wing, nose tip and the nasal column, so as to create the perfect proportion for the nose-sculpturing surgery.