If You Get One Nose Job, You Might Get Another

We've heard that with breast implants, one surgery often doesn't suffice over the entirety of a lifetime. However, we often don't think about whether or not other cosmetic procedures will need updates or tweaks over the years too. In a recent report in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), Nashua, NH, plastic surgeon Mark Constantian, MD, found that most patients who seek a repeated cosmetic nose surgery do so because of new or uncorrected deformities-similar to the reasons for patients undergoing their first nose job.

And in most cases, a second nose job is appropriate. For 41 percent of patients involved in the research, the reason for another nose job was the development of a new deformity—for instance, a previously straight nose that had become crooked. And in 33 percent, the first nose job failed to correct the original deformity. Another 15 percent of patients sought correction as they thought that their new nose lost their desired "personal, familial, or ethnic characteristics."

And it's important to point out these patients seeking multiple nose surgeries aren't patients with body dysmophic disorder—a mental illness that involves obsessive preoccupation with a perceived "problem" in one's appearance. The report suggests that 90 percent of patients studied have appropriate cosmetic or functional reasons for repeat rhinoplasty. Nearly three-fourths of the patients in this study had deformities that either developed after or weren't corrected by the original surgery. "To these patients, the first operation had either been wasted or had done harm," says Dr. Constantian.

Have you had a nose job? If so, were you satisfied with the result?