Rhinoplasty is a procedure that reshapes the nose. Dr. Caniglia performs primary rhinoplasty and secondary revision rhinoplasty, which involves rebuilding the nose. The procedure requires a great deal of knowledge and extensive skill. The goal is to sculpt the nose while maintaining its function. The procedure requires one to two hours.

DR. CANIGLIA: Rhinoplasty is a procedure where we reshape the nose, and we have what's called primary rhinoplasty where the patients have never had surgery before. Often, most commonly they want a smaller nose, less of a bump, smaller tip, shorter nose et cetera. The other is what we call a secondary or revision rhinoplasty or reconstructive rhinoplasty. I get a lot of patients that have had one, two, three, four rhinoplasties elsewhere, and a common mistake is over-resecting, or taking too much out. And in that case, we have to rebuild the nose. It is, out of all the procedures we perform as facial plastic surgeons, technically the most complex and requires the most knowledge. What I mean by that, if you think about the nose, I tell my patients every medium of the body is in the nose. You have skin, you have muscle, you have fat, you have cartilage, you have bone. You're trying to sculpt all these different medias into shape, but yet the nose has a function of warming and humidifying air we breathe in. So we've got to preserve the function, but yet, sculpt all of those different mediums into a shape that they like, and that takes great skill. It takes many years of experience, and it is one of those procedures, I don’t care how long you're in this business, you're continually learning. Rhinoplasty takes, on the average, about an hour, sometimes two hours or more if we're doing a reconstructive rhinoplasty. They'll have a very thin splint on for one week. After we remove that in a week, patients are out and about. And I always tell my patients, once the splint's removed, most people probably won't even know anything at that point. There could be a little bruising left over, typically not much. I also don’t pack the nose, and that makes the patients much more comfortable. I tell them it's probably going to be one of the easiest recoveries out of anything we do.