A nose job won’t just make you look better, it will also make you look younger.So finds a small study reported in the January/February edition of Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery.
Doctors in Toronto collected “before” and “after” pictures of 53 patients who had rhinoplasty procedures at a private clinic there. Then they recruited 50 regular folks and asked them to guess the age of the people in the pictures. Half of the volunteers viewed the “before” pictures first and were shown the “after” pictures a month later; the rest of the volunteers viewed the “after” pictures first and the “before” pictures one month later.
Overall, the patients, who ranged in age between 15 and 61, were judged to looked 1.5 years younger, on average, after their nose jobs. Rhinoplasties were particularly effective at “rejuvenating” the face if they changed the nose in two particular ways:
In cases where the dorsal hump at the top of the nose was reduced, the patient appeared to be 1.6 years younger, compared with only 1.1 years younger for those who didn’t have a dorsal hump to start with.
The other factor had to do with what’s called nasolabial angle, which measures how much the tip of the nose is turned up. Patients who had “nasal tip rotation” of more than 10 degrees were perceived as being 2 years younger than their actual age, on average, while those with less rotation looked 1.3 years younger than their actual age.
Two of the 53 patients in the study had both a dorsal hump reduction and the greater degree of nasal tip rotation; they were judged by volunteers to be 2.14 years younger than their actual age after surgery.
In general, the older a patient was at the time of rhinoplasty, the more the nose job helped them look younger. However, the difference between the age groups was not statistically significant.
The authors of the study explained that there are good reasons why these modifications would seem to shave years off a patient’s life. As we age, they write, “there is weakening of the major and minor nasal tip support mechanisms.” That causes the tip of the nose to slope downward and produces something called a “dorsal pseudohump.” So any procedure that reverses these characteristics would tend to be associated with youth.
“This is the first study to demonstrate a statistically significant decrease in apparent age after rhinoplasty,” the doctors concluded. “This decrease in apparent age is an extra positive benefit of rhinoplasty, in addition to an increase in the harmony of facial features and the improvement of overall facial aesthetics.”
The full study is behind a pay wall, but the introduction is online here.
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