Why Your Ears and Nose Look Bigger As You Age

You may have noticed it in your parents or grandparents — that slow spreading of their nose as they get older. And then one day you look in the mirror and … you have earlobes always looked like this? Or maybe you take a selfie with your friend and look back on it later and wonder if your nose was always so… pronounced.

While we are always our own worst critics, it is true that your nose and ears seem to grow or spread out over time. So, what is going on?

For starters, your nose and ears aren’t Actually growing, according to Dr. Jacob Rinkinena board certified plastic surgeon at Baptist Health Jacksonville. The appearance of our nose changes because our collagen production decreases as we age.

“Over time, gravity takes its course and collagen production decreases, which reduces the elasticity of the skin,” he said. “The tip of the nose drops more, giving the illusion of it getting longer, and you can start to see more bony prominences because you start to lose some of that soft tissue or fat around your bone and cartilage.”

So yes, your nose may become slightly longer as the tip sags and your dorsal hump (a bony bump that some people have on the bridge of their nose) may become more pronounced.

“Your nose has a bone structure, a cartilage structure, a muscle structure, and a skin structure. As you get older, your bone starts to resorb, so you lose some of that bone structure, and as a result, things start to move in the direction of gravity,” she said Dr. Muneeb Shaha dermatologist at Hudson Dermatology and Laser Surgery in New York City who is also known as popular TikTok user “DermDoctor.” “So your nose may hang a little bit lower because you’ve lost a lot of those structural elements.”

When it comes to ears, there is really only one part that changes over time: the earlobes. Gravity takes its toll on the earlobes over the years, and the soft tissue inside them loses its tone and elasticity as we age, said Doctor Jeffrey Marcushead of the Department of Plastic, Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery at Duke University School of Medicine. This is especially true for people who have worn heavy earrings all their lives.

While longer earlobes may give the impression that your ears have grown, Marcus explains that this is just a visual trick.

“Ears are about 90 percent of their adult size by the time kids are 8 or 9 years old, which is why a lot of kids look like they have big ears, because their ears grow faster than the rest of them,” he said. “And so if you measure a 10-year-old’s ear and you measure their parents’ ears from top to bottom, they’re often the same size. Ears don’t grow the rest of the [one’s] life. They just don’t.”

The good news is that our ears don’t really grow as we age, and avoiding heavy trinkets in your earlobes can help keep them from stretching out. But other than that, there’s not much else you can do to combat gravity. Can you stop your nose from drooping?

Minimizing your sun exposure will help maintain elasticity and collagen production, Rinkinen said. And if you have wrinkles around your nose that bother you more than your nose itself, he recommended asking your health care provider about laser treatments or chemical peels before doing anything invasive.

However, Marcus said that the only real way to prevent your nose from drooping is actually to get a preventive rhinoplasty.

“If someone gets a nose job in their 20s, it’s probably going to stay in place,” he said. “If it’s done right with good support, it probably wouldn’t droop.”

There’s no reason to “fix” the appearance of your nose unless it’s restricting your breathing in some way, Rinkinen said. But if it makes you self-conscious, you’re not alone. Marcus said he sees a lot of patients who want to do something about their nose when it starts to change.

“Most people who seek cosmetic rhinoplasty after the age of 45 — almost all of them are at least partially affected by the drooping appearance of the tip and the fact that it looks longer,” he said. “It’s one of the most common things we treat.”

That said, his best advice to anyone about dealing with these inevitable aspects of aging is a lot simpler than running to a plastic surgeon’s office.

“Stop taking selfies. They’re horrible,” Marcus said. “The biggest boon for rhinoplasty surgeons in the time of COVID so far has been the increased amount of time people have spent looking at themselves on screens, which make the nose look bigger. They make it look bigger than it is.”

And remember, no one looks at your appearance as closely as you do.

“With ears, it’s like the one body part whose primary function is to not stand out,” Marcus said. “There’s no one walking around saying, ‘Hey, you have really nice ears.'”