Dr. Shervin Naderi explains when it's safe to swim after a nosejob. You can do limited facial submersion in a private, chlorinated pool around 6 weeks, but avoid public water, lakes, and oceans due to infection risk. Full submersion activities like snorkeling and scuba should wait about 6 months, and goggle pressure can damage healing tissue for up to a year.
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How long should I wait after rhinoplasty to go snorkeling, scuba diving, swimming, go in salt water? Well, a couple things. One, there's a lot of incisions done in the nose. Whether it's open or closed doesn't make a difference. There's tons of incisions inside the nose. If you are going to a well chlorinated swimming pool in your own house and you trust it, then you know, you can probably submerge your face as soon as about six weeks or so after surgery. If you go into a public pool, if you go into a lake or an ocean, there have been cases of people that have never even had surgery. And some kind of parasite amoeba goes in the nose, travels up to the brain, causes brain infections. Don't do that. Can you go neck down into water and just kind of casually swim without truly submerging yourself? Yes. But snorkeling, scuba diving, and, you know, really submerging yourself after rhinoplasty should be delayed for about six months. That's the safety as far as, you know, health and infections. There's a second component and a third component. The second component, as the nose is healing, you don't want to be wearing like goggles or snorkels on, like really pressing, pressing down on it. It's gonna crush your nose. We don't want that to happen. So you really want to delay that as much as possible. Best to delay it as long as possible. But you know, if you have to do it, you have to do it. But most people don't have to wear goggles on their nose. So I'd wait about a year or so to do that. Now, there's a third component, and that's swelling. We want you to kind of be a couch potato for about a month to three months after surgery. That doesn't mean you're literally sitting on the couch. That doesn't mean you're, you know, in bed popping pain pills. No. After a week, you're up and about, you're going to work, you're going to school, you're going socializing, you go to dinner, you go to movies, you do stuff. But things that raise your pulse and things that raise your blood pressure, things that raise your cardiac output, things that make you flush more. Think about it. When you go to the gym, when you go for a run, you flush more, you get more red, veins start popping. All that stuff creates more swelling. We really want to delay that for as long as possible. I say at least a month, but preferably about three months. So look at that. You know, if you're wearing special hard pressured goggles on your face, wait about a year. But if you just want to swim with goggles that don't create that much pressure on your nose, and you want to submerge yourself in a lake or an ocean, wait about six months. But if your swelling is not too bad and you look great, especially you have thin skin and the swelling is coming down faster and you want to go for a casual swim, you can probably do it as soon as four to six weeks, but it's always best to wait longer.
