The collage is the grammar of modern facial reconstruction: a child with no external nose; the same girl years later with a reconstructed midface; a rib-cartilage ear taking shape under the skin of a forearm; titanium abutments in the scalp for a bone-anchored prosthesis or expander.

Those images align with the public case of Charlotte Ponce. At three months old, in 2002, a pet raccoon entered her crib and tore away her nose, part of her lip and cheek, and her entire right ear. Early repairs elsewhere failed. In 2012 she came to surgeons who staged the work by deformity: forehead flap and rib cartilage for the nose, an Abbé flap for the lip, then a prelaminated radial-forearm free flap. They carved a new ear from her own costal cartilage, buried it in the forearm so skin and vessels could wrap it, and months later moved that composite to the side of her head. A canal was opened so she could hear on that side. TODAY and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery – Global Open documented the sequence. She was about 12 when the ear left her arm.

The technique is called prelamination (or a prelaminated free flap). Cartilage from the rib is shaped like an ear (or a nose), slipped under thin forearm skin, and left until a blood supply grows. Microsurgeons then transfer skin, cartilage, artery, and vein as one piece. The same idea has been used for soldiers who lost an ear in a crash and for adults who lost a nose to cancer. It is not magic growth. It is delayed construction in a safer, better-vascularized bed.

The Spanish caption speaks of a “tragic accident” and a smile returned. For Charlotte the accident was an animal in a crib, not a car. The science is the same: staged flaps, rib grafts, sometimes scalp implants, years of revisions. No single operation ends the story. What the later photograph shows is a teenager whose central face has projection again—not an untouched original, but a working reconstruction.

Sources

• TODAY, “Girl who lost ear to a raccoon grows a new one — in her arm,” 2014
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery – Global Open (2016): staged nasal, lip, and prelaminated ear reconstruction after infant raccoon attack
• Johns Hopkins / NEJM and U.S. Army cases explaining prelaminated forearm ear flaps
• Standard references: forehead flap nasal reconstruction; bone-anchored scalp implants for prostheses or expanders