What's With the Nose Jobs, People?

People get nose jobs all the time. It's become something of a status symbol: once you've made it, you get to make totally unnecessary and costly changes to your face. Jennifer Aniston got one, as did Katie Holmes, Beyonce, Marilyn Monroe, Halle Berry, and of course, the late Michael Jackson. The list is astonishingly long. What do the celebrities named above have in common? They were all beautiful before their nose jobs. So what gives?

In January, Ezra Roth wrote a piece for this blog about the nose job "epidemic" in Iran, where thousands of women aspire to the Western (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) ideal of beauty. He wrote that Iran leads the world in rhinoplasty, with up to 70,000 operations per year.

Now I don't know about you, but I find Iranian women very beautiful -- and not in the asexual way one might describe an elderly woman as "beautiful." No, I find them sexy and gorgeous. Indeed, desirable. And I find them desirable precisely because they don't look like the women I went to college with in southeastern Minnesota. Likewise, I thought Halle Berry was a lot hotter when she looked less like a white woman.

To wit, on Sunday I called a friend with whom I often have dinner to see if she was free. She said no, because she's recovering from a nose job she got on Friday. She didn't tell anyone she was going to get one, and she asked me to keep it a secret. (I figure as long as I don't name her here, I'm not betraying that trust by writing a post about it.)

She mentioned her desire to get a nose job months ago, and I emphatically advised against it. She's indisputably beautiful. Men and women alike notice her on the street. Half-Thai and half-Vietnamese, she has an exotic look that's identifiably Southeast Asian, but still hard to place. And like many Southeast Asian women, she has a nose that many other women covet and, indeed, get surgery to obtain: petite, with a slight slope from the bridge to the tip, perfectly centered and symmetrical.

But she's wanted a nose job since she was 15, she said, to "make it more defined." (Like many Asian women, her nose has -- I mean had -- a general roundness to it.)

I told her she was crazy when she mentioned it and I didn't think of it again -- until she announced to me this weekend that she looked like the Swamp Thing and wouldn't be leaving her apartment for several days.

My first question was if her surgeon asked why she wanted the operation, and if he tried to dissuade her from getting it. Not really, she said. He merely asked what she wanted done, and then happily obliged. Of course he did: he's selling what she wants to buy.

This made me mad. Of course, my friend can do to her face what she wants. And if she thinks the beauty she was born with can be improved upon with surgery, then so be it. But shouldn't it also be the ethical responsibility of plastic surgeons to seriously question and consult with people who come to them for such operations?

In Iran as in the United States, if a surgeon has to ask what someone wants done to his or her face, maybe the operation isn't necessary. After all, no one else seems to see the "problem."

[Image: Beyonce, from ninjadude.com via Listaholic.com]

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