When we get to a certain age, the magnifying mirror becomes the beauty tool we love to loathe. It saves us from smudging our eyeliner, but it also amplifies some facial details that perhaps we’d rather not scrutinise up close. Like the skin on our nose. It changes over time. The pores get bigger, the texture more rough and inflamed. And have you got those tiny broken capillaries around your nose? Yeah, me too. I’ve had my suspicions about what causes this (in a word: booze) but I wanted to get the experts’ take to find out what we can do about it.

Enlarged, visible pores may simply be the result of a build-up of sebum (or oil), which regular extractions by a facialist’s nimble fingers should resolve. But the main culprit behind the thickening and reddening of the skin, it turns out, is rosacea – a sensitised dermal condition that causes flushing all over the face. (Read up more about it in our rosacea fact sheet.)



“There is a subset of rosacea that seems to affect the nose and not much else,” says dermatologist Dr. Chris Kearney from Sydney Specialist Dermatology. “There’s something about that area that it likes to come to.”



Years of sun exposure can also change the nose skin’s appearance, of course. Add in the fact that around 15 per cent of the Australian population is affected by rosacea to some degree, and that hormonal changes also play a role and you’ve got an ageing trend. Which I’m now calling “nosacea.”