About

Hello and welcome to our rhinoplasty blog!

I’m Tarick Smaili, M.D., a board-certified plastic surgeon and the medical director of the California Surgical Institute.

While I’ve performed many types of cosmetic plastic surgery during the last 12 years, rhinoplasty, or the nose job as it’s commonly known, is probably my favorite. (Here’s the rest of my biography.)

What’s special about nose surgery? It’s challenging! And, even after a dozen years of practice, there’s always something new coming along.

Nose surgery is so challenging because the human nose is amazingly complex. Young surgeons in training literally spend hundreds of hours learning the many internal parts and interconnected structures of skin, muscle, bone and cartilage that comprise a nose. Plus, it’s all held within a three-dimensional structure.

And finally – to provide patients with noses that fit faces — a rhinoplasty surgeon must have the hand and eye of an artist. Subtlety and a natural look is the byword!

Like many plastic surgeons, I paint and sculpt in my free time. In fact, it is this inborn artistic hand-to-eye coordination that makes rhinoplasty and other rejuvenation procedures so satisfying for both me and the patient.

I once had a medical school professor tell me that three parties are involved in any nose surgery: the patient, the surgeon and Mother Nature.

He mentioned Mother Nature because additional changes occur as a nose heals from surgery. So a plastic surgeon really masters nose surgery only when he has rejuvenated many hundreds of noses and then has observed the changes that time and healing can make.

I’ll be happy to take your general questions about nose surgery. Of course, I can’t deliver medical advice in a blog, but we can fill you in generally about the state of the art.

For instance, one reader asked about a nose surgery procedure known as “balloon rhinoplasty” being done in a few places to treat sinus problems. We’ll be talking about that later on, too.

Here are some typical topics we’ll be blogging about in the coming weeks and months:

• Surgical and non-surgical rhinoplasty.
• Closed Rhinoplasty and open rhinoplasty
• Who needs a revision rhinoplasty?
• Should teens have cosmetic plastic surgery of the nose?
• When should a nose just be left alone?