Does Liquid Rhinoplasty Make the Nose Look Wider?

How do you avoid a wide bridge with liquid rhinoplasty, or the five-minute nose job, or non-surgical nose job, whatever you want to call it? Well, raising the bridge actually makes the nose look more narrow, look more contoured. Think about people with a large dorsal hump. When you have a large dorsal hump, from the front the nose is quite narrow, but then you turn your head to the side and you see the hump. Now, when you take the hump down, this part of the nose actually gets a little bit wider. It doesn't matter what the technique is, it's always going to get a little bit wider. You can narrow the bones and make this narrow, but the upper part of it gets a little bit softer looking, because when you have a hump, it's a very narrow point, and as it comes down, it gets a little bit broader. It's an important concept to realize. So the opposite of it: when you raise the bridge, especially in Asian noses and African American noses, whether surgical or non-surgical, you're making the nose a little bit more narrow and contoured.

Now, non-surgically, you can make the nose wider if it's crooked. If you have a crooked nose and it kind of leans in this direction, you can take the filler and go on the concave side. Surgically, you can actually break bone, shift bone, do a septoplasty, move things over. But non-surgically, you can't do that. All you can do is take a layer of filler and go on the concave side. So if the nose has got a contour like this, you take filler and fill in this side to make it straighter. Non-surgically, that does make it wider. It's going to happen. There's no way around it. So it depends on what you're doing non-surgically, but if all you're doing is elevating the bridge, it shouldn't be wider.

Now, technique matters. The material matters. If you're using Juvederm products, that's more puffy. I don't like it in the nose in most patients, except a select few with extremely thin skin. I don't like Voluma in the nose. It gets more puffy. I don't like Radiesse in the nose. It can create inflammatory reactions and scarring. So Restylane is my favorite product for non-surgical liquid rhinoplasty, if done properly, in the proper patient.

A lot of patients are not a candidate. I say this all the time: I love liquid rhinoplasty. I love non-surgical nose jobs, but in the right person. Not everybody's a candidate. There are a lot of people who come in here looking for a liquid rhinoplasty, to try it out and see if they like it before they go through surgery. It's not a dry run. It's not a practice for surgery. It's a different look, and for most people, it's not the right look. So find the right surgeon who can do both, and we'll discuss one versus the other. If you just go somewhere where all they do is injections, you're probably going to end up with something that may not look right on you.