Do nose threads dissolve? Can I still have nose surgery later?

This is the question I’m asked most often when people come in about Nose LINE ON.

Compared with a nose that has never been treated, surgery involves one extra step, so it can be a bit more work for the surgeon. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have surgery, or that the result will be worse.

So this is what I tell people. If you’ve made up your mind to have surgery, I recommend surgery from the start. If you’d like to see how a higher nose would look before surgery, you could try filler. If you’re already leaning toward surgery, it’s better to go straight to surgery without a non-surgical treatment first.

People also often ask how far non-surgical treatment can go. It’s hard to define precisely, but a change of up to 20% from your nose’s current shape is well within what non-surgical treatment can do. Anything more is a big change, so I recommend a surgical approach. And when something that’s already there needs to be made smaller, such as shaving down a dorsal hump, narrowing wide nostrils or refining a bulbous tip, non-surgical treatment has limited effect, so I recommend surgery.

Here is what the research shows. How long PDO threads take to dissolve has been confirmed in animal studies. In studies in which the threads were placed under the skin of rats and minipigs, PDO threads broke down over about 24 weeks (6 months), and collagen formed around them during that time.

In the human nose, the picture calls for a little more caution. A 2023 Chinese study of 29 people who had revision surgery after thread-based nose augmentation found that the absorbable threads had been absorbed, but inflammation around the threads was most severe at 6–12 months and then gradually decreased, and the scar tissue that formed there affected how the revision surgery was planned. Even so, 26 of the 29 were satisfied with the results of the revision surgery. A 2022 Korean report on 7 people who had revision surgery for complications of thread rhinoplasty found that removing the threads weakened support for the nasal tip, so the patients’ own tissue had to be grafted. The material of the threads in this report was unknown, and they had not dissolved even years later. This means threads don’t rule out surgery later, but scarring or remaining threads can change the surgical plan. That’s also why, if you’re already thinking about surgery, I recommend going straight to surgery without having the non-surgical treatment first.