With toddlers wearing sheet masks, tweens buying wrinkle serums, and 30-somethings booking facelifts, it may seem like the beauty industry itself is aging backwards—its rituals and treatments getting younger along with its consumers. But there’s one procedure that’s flipping the script on the trend, appealing to a far older crowd than it has in the past. Rhinoplasty, long viewed as an operation for high-schoolers and college kids, is gaining popularity among midlifers. For the past two years, 40- to 54-year-olds have gotten roughly as many nose jobs as patients in their 20s, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, with each age group accounting for 26% of the total number of nose jobs performed in both 2023 and 2024.
In Beverly Hills, half of the patients who see board-certified plastic surgeon Catherine Chang, MD, for rhinoplasties are over 40. Linda N. Lee, MD, a double board-certified facial plastic surgeon in Boston, says more than 50% of the nose jobs she performs are on middle-aged women and men, noting that, in her case, there may be some selection bias in play; she tends to avoid operating on patients who are still growing, physically and emotionally, which limits the number of teens she treats. Some of the other surgeons I spoke with estimate that the 40-plus set comprises closer to 15% or 20% of rhinoplasty cases, but “that’s definitely more than I did five years ago,” says Adam Kolker, MD, a board-certified plastic surgeon in New York City.
Oren Tepper, MD, a board-certified plastic surgeon in New York City, says that when he first started his practice, he’d almost have to “take pause initially” when an older person came in wanting their nose done. He’d wonder why they didn’t consider surgery during a more conventional phase of life. (Prime time for rhinoplasty still generally falls into the transitional zones between high school and college or college graduation and a first job, he says, when the physical transformation can be “less jarring and more acceptable.”) He’s since come to realize that patients have all sorts of reasons for delaying nose jobs—and that some people want to tweak their nose at 40 or 50 even if it never bothered them before.
Still, some of those approaching rhinoplasty later in life do so with trepidation, notes Melissa Doft, MD, a board-certified plastic surgeon in New York City. They’ll commonly say, I should have done this when I was younger. Or ask, Is it ridiculous that I’m thinking about doing this now? While the stigma around plastic surgery has faded in certain circles, nose jobs are still strongly associated with the awkward toll of puberty. Dr. Doft puts patients at ease by explaining that midlife rhinoplasty “is actually more common than you think,” as a lot of adults are now pairing it with other procedures, like facelifts and eyelid lifts, in the name of facial rejuvenation. In fact, a study out of UCLA, which used an age-estimating AI tech to compare before and after photos, found that women appeared three years younger following rhinoplasty alone.
Why now? Behind the rise of midlife rhinoplasties
For younger generations, it’s hard to imagine a world without iPhones and Instagram. But the Gen Xers exploring rhinoplasty in 2025 grew up without these modern staples—and the extreme self-consciousness they tend to promote. “When we were 18 or 20, we looked in the mirror while brushing our teeth in the morning and mentally carried that image with us for the whole day,” Dr. Doft says. Photos were typically taken with us smiling at the camera, capturing that same straight-on reflection and rarely revealing our profiles. But now “we’re exposed in a way that we’ve never been exposed before—our every angle is out there,” Dr. Doft says. “It’s just a totally different level of pressure.”
Back in the day, rhinoplasty—plastic surgery, in general—had certain geographic strongholds, like Los Angeles and New York City, but it wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. Even if someone was embarrassed by their nose—because bullying, unlike selfies, is not a 21st-century invention—the idea of cosmetic surgery may have felt foreign, scary, or extravagant. And, so, “they put it off for years,” Dr. Kolker says.
“I’d wanted to get my nose done since I was 16, but my parents were absolutely not going to pay for a nose job. And where I grew up, in central Florida, plastic surgery wasn’t a thing that people did, especially in the ‘90s,” says Margot*, who got a rhinoplasty along with a facelift in her 40s. It wasn’t until her late 30s that she felt she was in a place, career-wise, where she could devote the necessary resources to surgery and recovery. Around the same time, she’d begun contemplating a facelift to address some early laxity along her jawline. The surgery presented an opportunity to address two insecurities in one fell swoop. She asked Dr. Doft to remove the small bump from her nose and narrow the tip. Now, she says, “I still look like myself, but my nose is sleeker and just fits my face a lot better.”
