A nose on the forehead? In what appears to be the most bizarre nose job ever, a man in China literally has a new nose on his forehead after damaging his original nose from an accident.

The 22-year-old man from China’s Fujian province, known only by the media as Xiaolian, impaired his nose during a car accident in August 2012. He suffered severe nasal trauma, and received just basic medical treatment after instead of plastic surgery due to lack of funds.

But after several months, he learned that economising for his own health had serious drawbacks. Without surgery, his nasal cartilage started to corrode, which made nasal reconstruction unfeasible.

Surgeons, however, came up with an idea that can be described as either ingenious or ridiculous: grow another nose on his face, more specifically, on his forehead.

They placed a skin tissue expander onto the patient’s forehead and cut it into a nose shape. They planted a cartilage as well, which was taken from his ribs. It required nine months to grow, and the result is nothing short of astonishing.

“We have gone through the hardest step and now it is not difficult to carry out transplant surgery,” Guo Zhihui, Director of Plastic Surgery Department of Xiehe Hospital, has been quoted by the New York Post as saying.

He added that a transplant for Xiaolian’s new nose will start soon.

As explained by Dr Patrick Byrne, director of Facial, Plastic and Reconstruction Surgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Centre in the U.S., the forehead skin is used to help reform the patient’s nose because it is the closest match to the nasal skin. But it is unusual for the nose to be reformed on the forehead itself.

“My guess would be that they felt that the tissue in the nose was so damaged they had to use the forehead skin on the interior part of the nose,” Dr Byrne, who was not part of Xiaolian’s surgical team, said, as per ABC News.

“It’ll be a real nose and [have a] breathing passage way.”