The method for racing the tip with rhinoplasty surgery is not by pulling on your skin. It is by removing and changing cartilaginous structures. This has very different effect on the titanium tissue. Simulating the effect of surgery by pulling on the skin is not having surgery. It’s apples and oranges. There are a lot of examples where the same fallacy also happens. For example, when people pull back on their skin simulating the effect of a facelift, their nasolabial fold typically looks much much better. After a facelift, the fold doesn’t have the improvement. Why? During facelift surgery we typically put tension on a tissue layer called the SMAS that attaches to the deep structures under the nasolabial fold. in someways detention put on the SMAS actually deepens the fold. A facelift lift also puts tension on the skin, but the final outcome is very different than the initial appearance of the patient taking their hands and pulling back on the skin in front of their ears. I recognize you’re not interested in a facelift, nor do you need one. It was simply an example of why pulling on the skin is not necessarily a good way of anticipating surgery outcomes. If you’ve not had surgery, and are contemplating having a rhinoplasty I recommend focusing on finding the best provider. Rhinoplasty surgery is fairly complex, and there is a fairly wide diversity of skill and experience among plastic surgeons for this type of work. I recommend patience, have multiple in person consultations, preferably with highly experienced providers in your community who have proven track record with rhinoplasty surgery. During each consultation, ask each provider to open up their portfolio and show you their entire collection of before and after pictures of previous patients who had similar facial characteristics to your own. Bring facial pictures of yourself to use as reference during consultations. An experienced plastic surgeon should have no difficulty showing you the before and after pictures of at least 50 previous patients. Being shown a handful of pre-selected images, representing only the best results of a providers career may be insufficient to get a clear understanding of what average results look like in the hands of each provider, what your results are likely to look like or a good understanding of how many of these procedures that surgeon has actually done. There’s no correct number of consultations needed to find the right provider. The more consultations you scheduled the more likely you are to find the better provider. The biggest mistake patients make is scheduling only one consultation which more or less eliminates the ability to choose the better provider. Best, Mats Hagstrom, MD