Gift, Male Autologous Rib Cartilage, No-Implant Nose Surgery, 4 Months

<Service should be kind by default. But that is also the basic standard for a person.> Hi. I’m the person who wrote a post three months ago about my nose surgery. Now that I’ve reached the four-month mark, when most of the swelling has gone down, I want to write a bit more. As I mentioned in my previous post, I consulted at four clinics in total, and only at Gift did I have two consultations. The reason was that the atmosphere there felt the most like a hotel, and the director and the manager touched my face the most. You know what I mean, right? Like an artist sculpting, kneading with their hands, checking this side and that, taking their time and carefully feeling over everything again and again without end. Of course, like most clinics, you shouldn’t expect much kindness from the reception or nursing staff. The kindest and friendliest clinic I’ve personally experienced in my life was the ApId clinic in Sinsa-dong. Even with so many patients coming and going, and no matter when I visited, it felt kinder than a five-star hotel in central Seoul. Even there, though, the nursing staff were cold to the core. You know that vibe, right? Like a convenience-store part-timer who looks at their phone and never greets customers whether they come or not. Are you all watching Smile Clinic? The exact feeling of JI Ye-eun sending customers away with a slight, mildly annoyed attitude, as if she had 0.00001% emotion, saying, “I’ll take you this way~” That was the vibe. I didn’t notice at first, but it does seem like some staff here are like that too. As I was writing, I thought maybe even the detective I met at the police station when I went to report a traffic accident might have been kinder. The reason I’m bringing this up at the start is that a hospital is not a place we go because we are sick and need treatment; it’s a place where we spend hundreds or thousands and receive a medical “service,” whether a procedure or surgery. Yet most hospitals still feel cold, as if they themselves are a university hospital emergency room. Does someone really have to teach them that a kind attitude is the absolute foundation of “service”? Has anyone here ever drunk coffee in Paris? The servers there are very kind. They casually use expressions like, “You are beautiful, mademoiselle.” And the customers are kind and warm too. No one has to be first, but if there is a staff member who acts cold toward a customer who first greets them or speaks in a friendly way, then that is 100% the clinic’s fault. A director in the middle of surgery cannot control every single detail like that, so perhaps directors who work with managers capable of controlling those things are the fortunate ones. Sorry for the long personal detour. If what I said above or what I’m about to say differs from what you think, then yours is just as right as mine. Now, putting that aside, let’s talk about the motive for the surgery, the thoughts I had over the months afterward, and beauty. <The era of beauty standards being raised across the board> Not long ago, there was a post that stayed popular on a community for a long time. It showed cropped parts of handsome and pretty celebrities and conveyed the idea that small details are not what matter; you have to look at the overall proportions, harmony, and atmosphere. Most people agreed, but I also had this thought. For most ordinary people, or people like me who are below ordinary, it isn’t just one or two things that are lacking. At minimum, there are three to five areas that feel lacking, so I couldn’t help asking myself whether that kind of approach really applies fully to ordinary people too. I’m older. In our time, faces like Lee Se-chang or Jang Dong-gun, with deep double eyelids like an Arab person and a strong T-zone, were considered handsome. Now, faces like Nam Joo-hyuk, Park Seo-joon, and Woo Do-hwan, in a Japanese expression a more refined “salt face,” seem to be seen as more attractive. But you know what? Since the modern era after the opening of the country, has there ever been a time when a low nose or a bulbous nose tip spreading sideways, or eyes like buttons, were the object of admiration or a standard of beauty? Not in comedy or documentaries, but in a serious drama. Especially in melodramas, have you ever seen a lead actor with that kind of face? In the end, even if each person’s charm point is different, and even if the standard of beauty changes with the times, a nose still needs a certain sense of height, and the eyes need a certain sense of length. The face is better the smaller it is, and it’s better if the mouth does not look protruded. The skin should be thin enough that the boundary of the face or the cartilage does not look blunt. Back in the day, if a man even just put on lotion, people would tease him for putting on makeup. That was something deeply embarrassing. But today’s young and rich are outstanding not only in ability but also in looks. I’m not saying everyone should immediately go and radically change their appearance through surgery. I’m saying that most people, whether they have no choice but to jump into that competition or are directly or indirectly affected by it, are now paying serious attention to appearance too. Just as the foreign-language ability of children in kindergarten today has risen absurdly compared with the past, everything is becoming more and more standardized at a higher level. In the end, men seem to care about their looks not to become celebrities right away, but from the psychology of not wanting to fall behind in competition. Even doctors and their families are doing cosmetic procedures and surgeries in this modern society. So that was my excuse for getting plastic surgery at my age. <I heard nose surgery doesn’t end in one go> That’s probably the thing I heard most from people around me. Looking back now, it’s also a statement I deeply relate to. The reason it doesn’t end in one go is ultimately because there is something left to be desired. Even doctors who perform surgery every day cannot guarantee the outcome 100%, and for ordinary people like us, that is even more true. Watching celebrities replace silicone periodically as if swapping out parts, I thought that was something I could not do. So I had surgery with the material shown in the fifth image above. The red was autologous costal cartilage, and the blue was ear cartilage. I rejected all other materials not made by my own body. If we look again at the before-and-after difference at the two-month mark under the same lighting and same angle, it looks like the sixth photo. If someone already likes this kind of image, they might naturally judge it as a good result, but looking back now, I think I wanted something a little more masculine and with more height in the side profile. Saying something looks natural can mean that it does not look awkward, but it can also mean that there is not a dramatic change compared with before. People often say that for a woman’s nose bridge, it starts around the center of the pupils, while for a man’s nose it starts from the eyelid or even higher, from the double-eyelid line. From the side after surgery, the tip of the nose sticks out more, and from the front the bulbous nose has improved, so it is much better than before. But because the bridge itself is still the same, the side view looks somewhat neutral, and from the front only the tip has come up, so it doesn’t show the amount of struggle it took. If it doesn’t need to show, then there was no reason to touch an already normal natural nose in the first place. In the end, I came to understand why there is still no material that can replace silicone for building a nose bridge, and why people who choose silicone, even while dealing with contracture, end up choosing silicone after all. Let’s look at one more photo. Please look at the seventh photo. The left side is the current appearance, the right side is the simulation result, and the center shows how much more would need to be removed to get the result on the right. The advantage of the left side, the current appearance, is that it makes me look younger. Since the place where the bridge should be is sunken in, I can look younger, and the nose does not look large or long. The advantage of the right side, after simulation, is that it can look a little more masculine and refined. But since my face is already long, the director’s opinion was that if I raise the bridge too, my face may look even longer from the front. Since the photo above is one month after surgery and the tip is still lifted, this time let’s take the most recent appearance, four months after surgery, with the tip lowered, and do the simulation one more time. The eighth photo is the current appearance. The ninth is the side profile corrected into what I think looks masculine and refined. The tenth shows how much it would need to be raised to get it up like the second version. How does it look? Even if preferences differ, you’ll probably agree that a nose with a higher glabella area looks more masculine than a low nose. If I could remove the mosaic over the eyes, that masculine feeling would come across even more clearly, which is a shame, because I can’t show it. <If you like that height on the day the splint comes off, then the surgery failed> There could be some debate over the claim that nose surgery doesn’t end in one go. But I don’t think there is any room to argue with the sentence above. Because there is inevitably going to be tremendous swelling on the day the splint comes off. If I ever have a second operation, I think I’d ask the clinic to absolutely film the immediate post-op state, when the swelling is at its minimum. As everyone knows, for several months after surgery you have to spend your time with the swelling hiding what your final nose will look like, and that period is not easy at all. So every time I visited the clinic for follow-up, I asked the director about revision surgery. I did feel bad about constantly holding them up and asking when it wasn’t consultation time. Anyway, if I were to raise the glabella and tip again, I’d probably need about 4 to 5 mm of silicone or even more, plus ear cartilage. A dead zone could form between the bridge and the tip, so another material might be added. And whether my skin could withstand being raised that much in the first place is another matter, so that would need additional consultation too. As an aside, after operating on the tip, you must not look only at the tip. Even in my case, the glabella that seemed completely fine ended up looking somewhat sunken once the tip was raised. For no-implant tip surgery, the person who benefits most is probably not someone like me whose entire nose is low overall, but someone whose area from the glabella to the nasal bone is high, yet the tip alone is very precisely low, or someone with a severe hooked nose. That’s why so many people have osteotomy and then define the line with silicone. There is a reason for that. <Even so, why I still can’t decide on a second surgery> All the photos I’ve shown so far are changes from the side, but I also have to think about the changes from the front. For a long midface like mine, there is a view that if silicone is inserted, the radix becomes higher and the starting point of the nose itself becomes longer, so the nose and face may look longer and older. That is why people also say that the longer the face, the thinner the silicone should be and the lower its starting point should be, and that a straight-oblique line rather than a straight line can make the midface look shorter. The lower the tip droops, the longer the nose and face look, so slightly lifting the tip would also help a long face. The things I just explained are not just my opinion, but also the shared opinions of the directors I consulted. Anyway, if I do a second surgery, should I add silicone even at the cost of additional expense, post-op pain, and a higher chance of side effects, in order to make the side profile I want? Or should I just be satisfied with the first surgery? If I prioritize the silhouette of the side profile, then it’s a second surgery. If I think about the stability and cost of autologous tissue and the first surgery, then I should stop here. That’s what I thought, but when I think about it carefully, money can be earned, pain can be endured, but if a second surgery done to improve the side profile makes the front view worse than before, then. If my already long face ends up looking even longer by even a little bit, then this may be a surgery that is not necessary, or rather, should not be done at all. So I’m trying to calm down my desire for a second surgery as much as possible. Since only the tip was operated on with autologous cartilage, there are no particular side effects. The only discomfort is that because the crooked nose was straightened, the internal structure changed a bit, so breathing through the left nostril is a little harder than through the right. As I said in my previous post, even if I could turn back time with the memories I have now, if I could meet a director like Director Yu again, I think I would get nose surgery again even if one side were uncomfortable. But even then, I think I would still worry specifically about whether to use silicone. - Please forgive any typos as part of the charm. - For three months my nasal mucosa felt so burning and hot that it felt like I had been hit with military tear gas, and I thought I was going to die. - Please do not send private messages. If you leave a comment, I will reply even if it is late. Please ask about costs in a private comment. - All photos were taken by me. - The next review will be about natural adhesion double-eyelid surgery, but since it is just a brief buried double-eyelid case, I’ll probably sum it up in a short review. - The clinic did not ask for a long write-up like this at all. Even my last post was surprising enough for them. I’m writing this because I want to, and because I want to help others who are about to have surgery. - Even so, I don’t think I can write two long posts like this. At this point, I think I’ve fully kept my loyalty to the manager and director who made my face better than before. - Ah... I want liposuction for my double chin....