How skin thickness affects nose reshaping - Washington DC - Dr. Shervin Naderi

Skin thickness is really important in rhinoplasty, because if you think about the surgery, essentially, we make the changes underneath the skin. We change the cartilage, we change the bone, we rearrange it, but then the skin has to drape over the nose. It's the icing on the cake. If the skin is very thick versus a very thin skin, the approach is different. The surgery is different. I'll give you an example. With very thick skin, it's almost like a heavy canvas. It weighs down the cartilage and the bone. And a lot of patients with thicker skin are usually ethnic patients who also happen to have weaker cartilages. So to get better definition and actually a narrower tip, you have to add cartilage, place sutures to modify the cartilage. Whereas in thinner skin patients, you make a very meticulous move, and that meticulous move shows up because the thin skin just drapes over that area. So it's a very different surgery. The healing phase is also different. With thicker skin, there's a little bit more swelling. You may require some steroid injections later on, but essentially, with either type of skin thickness, you can get really nice results.