What's Changing in Rhinoplasty and Facial Rejuvenation?

Good morning, happy Monday. As many of you who follow me on social media probably saw, I was in California, Los Angeles, the last few days. I was at the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery's annual meeting. I've been going to this meeting for 30 years. Yes, the gray hair gives it away.

But this year was especially nice, and there was lots of rhinoplasty, lots of facial rejuvenation, lots of aging face surgery and reanimation, etc. And it was really nice to see surgeons from all around the world, not just the United States, but surgeons from South and Central America, from Europe and Asia. Everybody came together. The lectures were fantastic, and I got a chance to catch up with some of my most amazing colleagues who I have known for many, many decades, and kind of see that we've been doing things the right way.

I mean, there's no crazy new procedures, there's no wild shift in procedures. Everything has evolved at the right pace and we all agree on the same things. Now, they always say when a new plastic surgeon goes to one of these meetings, the most dangerous time for one of their patients is Monday morning when they come back, because they want to try it all. They learn so much. They want to try it all.

Well, when you have so much gray hair, what I saw was basically reaffirmation of what we've been doing. And yes, you always pick up a couple of little nuances, a stitch that you may throw differently, a quick little modification of a procedure, but we've been doing things the right way.

For example, when it comes to rhinoplasty tip support, I was so happy to see that in the entire room, pretty much everybody's gone away from using columellar struts as the main way of supporting the tip, and they've come to using caudal septal extension grafts. Really important. So rhinoplasty has really changed, whether it's preservation or structure or hybrid techniques. People are starting to do it the right way. We've been preaching this for a long time.

When it comes to the aging face, it's not that all fillers are good or all fillers are bad. When you need reanimation, when things have to be re-suspended back up and tucked back up, you've got to do it. You cannot force it with fillers. If you need a deep plane facelift, neck tightening, if you need the eyebrow to be reshaped, re-suspended, we don't like to call it a brow lift, because you don't want to shove the brow way up and have your forehead look like a deer in the headlights. But those reshaping procedures, tightening the lower eyelids, improving the length of the lower eyelid, the cheek trough groove, those are really important things. And everybody is in agreement.

Now, everybody's got a slightly different taste, a slightly different aesthetic, but we've all been doing things the right way. So if you go to a place where all they do is one thing, meaning all they do is fillers, or all they do is Botox, or they have one laser, you've got to find somebody who can do it all. When you go to a plastic surgery center where they have a lot of options, you get the best thing for you. Happy Monday.