Given that cartilage keeps growing after everything else stops (even after death I have heard) and that the nose is made of cartilage, will Micheal Jackson some day have a real nose again (assuming that he doesn’t have more plastic surgery to make it even more weird) if he lives long enough?
People with normal noses do not grow huge ones by the time they are older, nor do they generally change shape, so I would say no. Where did you hear this about cartilage? Perhaps they meant that it countinues to regenerate.
I thought that the only two things that kept growing after death were the hair and toe- and fingernails.
Hair and fingernails - and cartilage for that matter - do not continue to grow after death. This is a complete myth. There is no mechanism in a dead body to allow this to happen. How would growing hair and fingernails get the required blood supply?
The nose and ears do grow as one gets older.
MJ’s nose could get bigger, but not so much that it’d look ‘normal’.
‘As we age, the outer ear undergoes natural changes. Collagen fiber relax, causing telltale creases and elongated earlobes’
from plastic surgery site:
http://appearancecarecenter.com/article1.html
(I would make a reasonable guess and say the nose has similar changes going on. )
A slight hijack, but this website illustrating MJ’s face over the years is fascinating, if slightly repulsive:
This subject gives us less and less to talk about.
Cartilage does not grow back. My daughter’s foot and ankle specialist disabused me of the notion that it does, just the other day, saying “What you’re born with is pretty much all you get.” There’s a world full of people with arthritis who can only wish it did regenerate.