My Nose Points and Flares when I Smile, How Can I Change This? (Photos)

Hi there,

This is a common problem . You have a tension nose. This just means that when you smile a little muscle joining the lip to the nose activates and pulls it down.

It can be corrected by a little bit of botox placed just at the bottom of the columella of the nose.  Worth starting with that.  It might have a secondary effect of making your upper lip feel a bit less "controlled" and not everybody likes that, but if you don't it will wear off and just don't repeat it.  If you like it, you'd need it repeated either twice or three times per year. It would only need 2 or 3 units, so is a cheap solution.

It's a simple problem to fix surgically.  There is an incision placed across the columella base.  The muscle is divided.  Usually I fix the medial crura of the alar cartilages to the lower septum to further brace the nose tip in case the muscle reattaches itself which it can.

Good luck!

There are muscles that pull the nasal tip down as well as pull the nostrils laterally. I've had good luck with injecting a few units of Botox into specific areas around the nose to soften the pull of these muscles. The effect lasts about three months and it is not very costly.

Surgically, you can decrease the size and reshape the nostrils as well as trim the muscles causing the lateral pull for a more permanent effect

Everyone's nose gets wider with smiling, but it tends to be more noticable in patients with already relatively flared nostrils at rest. Surgery can reshape the nostrils so that they are less flared. When expertly performed, the incision is usually almost invisible. There is a muscle that brings the tip down with smiling that can be cut to correct that issue but sometimes it reattaches.