In what is the first surgery of its kind, Guo Zhihui, a Chinese surgeon, says that he has constructed a nose out of a 22 year-old man’s rib cartilage and implanted it under the skin of the man’s own forehead for later transplant.

Zhihui operates at the Fujian Medical University Union Hospital in China’s Fujian province. He spent nine months constructing the graft of a new nose, aiming to replace the man’s original nose.

The patient, named Xiaolian, lost most of his nose in an accident that occurred in 2012. He did not seek medical attention because he lacked the money to pay for it. Not undergoing reconstruction surgery led to an infection, which ended up eating away much of his nose cartilage.

Zhihui’s team examined the remnants of his nose and decided that they could not graft cartilage there. So they decided to build the nose on the forehead. When the new nose is rotated into position, it will have its own blood supply from the forehead before it develops new blood vessels. They say that extensive surgery later will smooth out all of the skin.

Zhihui compared what his team did to carpentry: they began by expanding the skin on the man’s forehead for three months, and then used rib cartilage to form the nose bridge. Finally, they built the nostrils.

Because the images of the implant are so impactful and visually striking, they have drawn widespread international attention, which Zhihui did not foresee.

“We were just interested in helping the man and did not expect it would stir up this much attention,” Guo told The Associated Press in a September interview.

Alexander Seifalian, a professor of nanotechnology and regenerative medicine at University College London, has performed numerous transplants using stem cells. He said that using the forehead as the implantation site was sensible because the skin there is of similar structure and texture to that of a nose.

Surgeons have used cartilage before to rebuild noses in their original positions, and they are currently experimenting with stem cells, using them to grow new ones on other parts of the body. While one has been grown on a forearm, this is the first case where it was done on the forehead, and by far, it is the most visually surprising.

The new nose is doing well and is expected to be transplanted back to its proper setting sometime in the future.