Okay, here’s the bad news. Not only does your skin wrinkle and sag as you age, but your nose drops too.

Here’s the good news: there is a solution in the case of a nose that drops significantly adding years to the appearance of one’s face.

Dr. Jeffrey Raval, board certified facial plastic surgeon, has raised the noses of aging patients surgically and in doing so has eliminated years from their appearance. Often this type of surgery is in companion with other facial surgery, i.e. facelift or brow lift, addressing all at the same time.

“The nose ages, dropping as we gain years,” explains Dr. Raval, who is also a board certified facial plastic surgeon. For patients who have a particularly elongated nose, the advancement in years means their nose grows disproportionately long for their faces, aging their appearance unnecessarily.

Known as The Nose Guy, a credit given to him by fellow surgeons who apprise his nose jobs as being exemplary, Dr. Raval is able to turn back the clock in a patient’s appearance by elevating the nose just enough to look more attractive and youthful while retaining its full and necessary function for breathing.

That’s another plus to Dr. Raval’s capabilities: he’s board certified in both ENT and facial plastic surgery so that he understands both the aesthetics and function of the nose inside and out and can perform surgery to address both aspects—both very necessary aspects—of the nose.

“He’s got your eyes,” joyful grandparents coo at the infant they cradle in their arms while seeing in their memory their own son, father to this baby. While an infant may resemble his mother’s or father’s baby pictures at birth, the likelihood of the child manifesting other inherent traits, like a large nose, are likely to show up as the child gets older.

That inherent propensity along with the fact that the first thing that’s noticeable when you see someone’s face is usually their nose when they’re younger and their eyes when they’re older, make nose jobs a real consideration today for young people with outsized noses.

Dr. Jeffrey Raval prefers to postpone nose surgery on a child until they are past puberty and their nose has reached the size it will remain.

But some unique cases call for surgery before that time.

Take for example the case of the young teenage girl who had a natural stage presence and loved to act. In elementary school and junior high, she’d found her niche. But when she got to high school and was as anxious to star in the school play, a thoughtless boy had ridiculed the size of her nose. It was humiliating enough to the girl that she withdrew from acting and increasingly retreated to being a solitary child, keeping to herself.

Her parents were aware of the ridicule their daughter had suffered by her classmate and sought out Dr. Raval to assess their daughter’s candidacy for a nose job. She was a fit for surgery, Dr. Raval determined.

“This was a case that surgery totally changed a life,” says Dr. Raval. “I could see an entire revision of her self-esteem and personality.”

The young lady regained her confidence and reinvested herself in participating in stage plays, regaining her stage presence because of her innate talent, only now without the embarrassment of having a naturally outsized nose. Hollywood will likely chronicle her story years from now.

“It’s this kind of surgery that is so rewarding,” adds Dr. Raval.

Sometimes a first-time nose job does not result in the nose a patient wants.

That’s where Dr. Jeffrey Raval has gained his stature among fellow physicians in Colorado and the entire western region in revision rhinoplasty. He’s even known as The Nose Guy among surgeons.

The revision rhinoplasty is the toughest nose surgery of all to perform, explains Dr. Raval. “There is a lot of scaring after the first nose surgery. You [the surgeon] never know quite what was done in the initial surgery. Oftentimes, the nose needs to be rebuilt because the biggest problem the second surgeon encounters is that too much of the nose—bone and cartilage—was removed the first time.”

One doctor who sought out Dr. Raval for his repeat nose surgery actually shed tears upon completion of the second surgery. Tears of happiness, because the nose job that had gone so wrong at the hands of a different doctor previously, was corrected to exactly the look the he wanted with his revision rhinoplasty by Dr. Raval.

In the years he’s been in practice in Denver, Dr. Raval has seen his patient base for nose jobs extend to cover many states in the western region. Patients have come to him from as far away as Wyoming, Idaho and Nebraska, having heard he’s the go-to surgeon for the most well done first-time and repeat rhinoplasty surgeries.

Maybe you know someone who has had surgery for a deviated septum. Their nose, they tell you, was crooked on the inside.

The thing is everyone has some level of deviation of their septum. Whether that deviation is big enough to warrant surgery versus not, is largely dependant on the functionality of their nose.  If the patient has a difficult time breathing through their nose from a deviated septum then their septum may need to be straightened.

“No one has a perfectly shaped nose,” explains Dr. Raval. “When the shape of the nose creates a functional breathing problem is when the nose may require surgery.”

Many times evidence of a deviated septum on the inside of the nose is reiterated by the poor shape of the outside of the nose—with the patient having suffered an injury or just by the genetics he or she inherited.

Dr. Jeffrey Raval is board certified in ENT (ear, nose and throat) and in facial plastic surgery and reconstructive head/neck surgery. The training he has in both the outward appearance of the nose and the inner functions give him an advantage surgically in understanding the necessary function as well as the beauty of how the nose works and looks.

It used to be that nose jobs, rhinoplasty, in the ‘60s, 70’s and 80’s resulted in a lot of upturned pixie noses. Large noses were minimized into dramatically smaller ones, upturned at the tip. The problem with this, explains Dr. Jeffrey Raval, is that the aesthetic and function didn’t work in concert for the patient.

One of the missing parts about nose jobs like this is the reason for newer techniques in nose jobs today. “When we take something out of the nose, we realize we weaken it and we have to put something back,” says Dr. Raval.

Yes, even in the case of making a nose smaller, a new application of cartilage is necessary to help reshape the nose to be most natural looking and better functionally.
The cartilage can be harvested from one’s own body—like from the nose itself or the ear—or is readily accessible from surgical suppliers.

In the case of a person who has had nose injuries—one or more—in athletics, especially, the need for additional cartilage is apparent because the inside of the nose has collapsed, leaving a flattened or mashed look. Inserting bone and/or new cartilage will remedy that.

Another thing that happens after a person has suffered an athletic injury to the nose, or even in a car accident, is that the nasal cartilage may be lost and has to be replaced. This is also true in the case of a revision rhinoplasty—repeat nose surgery when a first nose job has been a failure.

Dr. Jeffrey Raval is known among fellow physicians as The Nose Guy for his expertise in revision nose surgery.

Because Dr. Jeffrey Raval is board certified in both ear, nose and throat and as a facial plastic surgeon, he knows the nose inside-out. That means he has a full understanding of the aesthetic appeal of a nose from the outside as well as intimate knowledge about the functionality of the nose on the inside, even the sinuses.

The benefit: patients net his surgical expertise on all aspects of the nose and its appearance and function.

When a person has a crooked nose, Dr. Raval explains, they don’t breathe as well and they can possibly suffer from sinus problems. Dr. Raval can address all of those issues in one surgical procedure. Another plus: because patients have a functional problem with their nose that Dr. Raval corrects surgically while simultaneously addressing the aesthetic problem they have, their insurance will often cover the functionality portion of the surgery which reduces their cost of the overall surgery. That’s a plus because rhinoplasty for aesthetic purposes only is considered cosmetic and is therefore not usually covered by insurance.