Sex: Typically, a woman can have a nose that is shorter, more turned up, than a man.  Shorter can look cute on a woman, but a man wouldn't want to have a very short nose, because in today's culture it wouldn't look masculine.

Age: A young person can have a shorter nose than an older person.  The nose tends to lengthen with time.  It doesn't actually grow, but the connections that hold the tip cartilages to the upper part of the nasal framework weaken, allowing the tip to drop and the nose to appear longer.  We generally associate a longer nose with an older person; most people perceive that the girl pictured above looks older in the before photograph.

When deciding on nasal length during surgery, even if the main goal of the operation is to shorten the nose, I tend to leave the nose longer on adults, because a nose that would be cute on a sixteen-year old might look inappropriate on a sixty-year-old face.

Height: The simple relationship we discussed on the previous page about seeing a glimpse of the nostrils from the frontal view works fine if everyone on the planet were exactly the same height, but since people come in all different heights, we have to take that into consideration.  You look up to look at a tall person, and so you naturally get a better view of the tall person's nostrils.  If that tall person has a short nose, too, your view of the nostrils might be better than you'd like to have.  As a result, a tall person should be left with a slightly longer nose than a short person.

A person of average height looks down to look at a shorter person, so your angle of view prevents you from seeing the short person's nostrils; the short person can therefore have a shorter nose.

Preferences: Obviously, the patient's personal taste in noses should also be a strong consideration.

So a short, young female, such as the person pictured above, can have the shortest nose, and a tall, adult male should be left with the longest nose.  Got it?  There'll be a test next week.