In my practice, most patients really want to look like themselves still. They're trying to make certain changes like augment the bridge, maybe refine the tip a little bit, bring in the base, make the nostrils a little smaller, but not so much that anyone could even tell. I mean, right now there is a young lady who works in my office, and I did a rhinoplasty on her mom three months prior to her starting to work there, and she's away in college. She came here for the summer. She didn't realize her mom had had a rhinoplasty, even though her nose did look different. It was so, you know, subtle and symmetric and proportional, she had no idea. Now some patients do want something a lot more dramatic. They really want the bridge to be higher. They really want the tip to be refined and pointed and not look particularly Asian anymore, and that could be pretty hard to deliver, although it can be done, but it depends on the patient. If they had thick skin, that's probably not going to work very well.

When patients come in and they say, "I really want a minimal change to my nose, but I want something still very specific that I can see," it's not so much that they're trying to hide it from anybody, they just want to change it to a point that they're satisfied with it. I mean, many of them are private and they don't want other people to know, but that's not really the only reason that people want to keep things subtle and natural. That's just the way they want to look. They don't want to look in the mirror and see somebody else. They want to look in the mirror and see a refined version of themselves.

Asian Rhinoplasty Can Make Subtle But Significant Changes

Just because a person gets a rhinoplasty, doesn't mean they desire huge changes. Dr. Chase Lay explains that the biggest changes can be the smallest.