Today I’m going to take a short respite from my regular biannual fashion content to tell a story about a recent experience I had. Expect a little garden-variety body dysmorphia, a dash of narcissism, and many epiphanies.
About a month ago I went on a solo trip to Manhattan, where I stayed in a semi-dingy hostel in the Garment District, ate several hot dogs, resented my non-vacation life, and did lots of cool, independent things that are a story for another time. After a dirty martini too many at famed Cool-Kid hang Lucien, I one-eye-closed ordered a $70 trucker hat from Praying, a streetwear brand enjoyed by Lucien regulars and Jennifer Coolidge alike.
The black hat was the perfect emblem of my L.E.S. socialite-esque mental state that evening: flat black emblazoned with the words GOD’S FAVORITE.
(In a cruel twist of irony that’s the perfect emblem for how I felt the next morning, I had to email customer support to cancel my drunken hat order after I realized it’d almost overdraft my account).
But regardless, I felt justified buying the hat for a few reasons. I love wearing avant-garde pieces, enjoy irritating evangelicals, and suffer from a pretty severe case of Main Character Syndrome. And besides a lifelong battle with moderate psoriasis (a story/therapy session for another time), the genetic lottery hasn’t failed me. Blonde hair, blue-eyes, long legs, broad shoulders, skinny wrists. What I lack in breasts I make up in an existent ass and wide, round hips. My face is mostly symmetrical with nicely arched brows, high cheekbones, and rosebud lips that unveil a very wide smile that shows off all 32 teeth. But there’s also this goddamn nose.
My nose is broken. Or rather, it was broken during an unfortunate Lutheran Day Camp lawn game accident in fifth grade. My too-tight Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup tee was soaked in blood, but because it was 2005 and my parents probably didn’t have health insurance, we left it alone. Rubbed some dirt on it if you will. Plus, my dad’s broken his nose at least three times and he’s very handsome in a Provencal French Actor kind of way.
Cut back to the present and I’d like to return to two paragraphs up where I was bragging about myself, if I may. You see, in the past five years or so I’ve lost a lot of weight, approximately sixty pounds. Not that you need to be thin to be good looking, but in my opinion, becoming thinner has made me much better looking in many ways. It blessed me with thinner thighs and what I call “Carrie Bradshaw Sternum,” but it also cursed me with a much more exaggerated spotlight on my very smashed-up septum. Apparently, when you lose your baby weight and become a bony adult, your broken nose transforms from a little teardrop shaped ball of clay to a something you might find a prosthetic of at Spirit Halloween.
My nose isn’t huge at all, but it is pretty spiny, with somewhat swollen sides and a downturned tip. It’s shaped not like a ski jump, but rather like when you’re walking away from the lodge with your poles-in hand to drop onto an easy black diamond run. From certain angles it looks pretty straight, from other angles it looks like a Roman statue that got dropped and chipped right on an otherwise straight bridge. From extra bad angles on extra bad days, seeing it in pictures has literally made me cry (a bit dramatic, I know).
I absolutely adore myself, but I’ve always hated this beak.
Don’t get me wrong, I still get compliments and dates and the whole-nine-Pretty-Privilege-yards. And the funny thing is, I’ve always been into big, convex noses. Real high fashion models tend to have interesting side profiles and I’ve always liked Angelica Huston movies. Plus, my “type” has been tall, skinny, Adam Driver-esque men since before it was cool. Even when I’ve dated Keebler Elf-nosed men (there have been a few), Vincent Cassel and Adrien Brody were always on my mind.
But my nose? It had to go.
Fast forward through many months of waiting, page upon pages of pop-medicine breathing books (it turns out my nostrils and airways are actually very fucked), tense conversations with my mom, doctor’s appointments, promising news about insurance coverage, holistic remedies ranging from Tibetan breathing techniques to literally mouth tape, and of course, lots of cartilage prodding and Flonase Drip, I finally find myself in the waiting room of a plastic surgeon. I have butterflies in my stomach and hope in my heart, my finger hovering over my Instagram bookmarks tab labeled “Nose,” ready to be consulted.
Yes, I will admit that I had been nose shopping: saving and screenshotting pictures of beautiful models and actresses that had Romanesque, straight, beautiful noses (Gisele, Diana Agron, and certain angles of EmRata made frequent appearances). Because you see, I had grown used to having a strong profile. I had lived in France for five weeks (don’t you forget it) and in no way did I want to alter my face completely or strip it of its European charm. It would be a subtle straightening that would help my very real breathing issue, which was not only a major selling point to my family and friends, but also how I convinced myself I was ready to go under the knife.
I end up sitting in the waiting room for an hour for unexplained reasons, watching a closed-circuit plastic surgery channel on loop: infomercials of real Kybella patients chatting about their former double chins over the dinner table and an eerily expressionless Tik Tok surgeon doing laser therapy on daytime TV hosts. Regular patients that look like Bravo cast members flow in and out while I tap my foot in anticipation, my new face and lease on life just beyond the door covered in Juvederm information pamphlets.
Suddenly, I’m on that plastic-covered recliner in that sterilized room, and in walks Dr. _________: the sculptor that would eventually chisel my cartilage away. He’s slicked-back and seems impatient, summarizing my nasal passages and “functional” surgical concerns in as few words as possible before whisking me Willy Wonka style into the hallway for my photo op (the part he wa$ obviou$ly mo$t excited about).
*click* *turn* “BEAUTIFUL”
*turn* *click* “GORGEOUS”
As he’s taking my “before” pictures, I can’t stop thinking that he’s lying.
Then we sweep back into the office, where he pulls up an iPad and shows me a high-res photo of my rough-cut marble schnoz in all of its glory, sebum-y pores glistening in the flash. It was looking especially beaklike as he pulled out his stylus but I didn’t flinch away this time, because this was my MOMENT. What I had dreamt of for years! My nasal baby’s gender reveal!
With a nervous grin on my face, I reiterated to Dr. _________ that I didn’t want anything too drastic; I just wanted some straightening of the bump, and no ski jump tip. He nodded impatiently before making a few strokes on the screen, then turning it for my approval.
Next to my eagle-esque profile is the profile of someone new. Same eyes, same chin, but Cindy Lou-Who-ized. She looks innocent, infantile, and also pretty fucking stupid.
I start to sweat and fumble in my bag for my phone, shakily showing him a picture of Diana Agron laughing at a dinner party (thank god I didn’t show him EmRata). He looks a little insulted and draws back about a millimeter of nose, saying that there’s not much else he can do because my nose isn’t that big to begin with, but that he thinks that his work would look very natural and that it would “look beautiful on me.”
Apparently, my understanding that getting a nose job would be like going to Build-a-Bear Workshop was incorrect.
I look at Old Me vs. New Me side-by-side, somewhat paralyzed. New Me is Barbie pretty, sleek and Hadid-ish. But Old Me is me. Strangely, something about her and her tomahawk nose seems more compelling now.
But New Me is who I’ve been waiting months, if not years, for! She might not be EmRata or even remotely what I had in mind, but she’ll grow on me!
I thank Dr. ________ and have a disheartening conversation with a receptionist who extinguishes my remaining optimism by telling me that insurance likely won’t cover any cosmetic work. I Charlie Brown trudge to my car and sob on the phone for a while to my mom in the parking lot.
It’s always hard to wrap your head around disappointment. It’s even harder to wrap your head around seeing a picture of a pretty face that is yours, but isn’t. And it’s hardest to wrap your head around justifying going thousands of dollars into debt when the results aren’t guaranteed to make you feel more beautiful or pull you more hot dates. A life-changing decision is supposed to feel weird, but it’s supposed to feel better than this.
Like usual, my mom (<3) assures me that it will all be okay, that I’ll make the right decision for me, and that I am beautiful as-is. She also tells me to go get a coffee and a treat, so I follow her advice. In a parking space outside my favorite coffee shop, I wipe my mascara out from under my eyes and put on lip gloss, noticing the woman in the mirror as I do. She has a strong, sensual, interesting face; masculinity and femininity dancing across either side of a flattened, freckly bridge. I smile a little and go inside.
My favorite barista is working, and by favorite, I mean the hot one I have chemistry with. His head jolts as I walk in, and he looks me in the eye with what I interpret as a soft longing as he takes my order. As he stands at the espresso machine making my iced oat milk latte, I notice his nose poking out of dark pieces of his wavy hair. It is big, bumped, sloping, and absolutely stunning. 11/10 nose. He wishes me a good day as he watches me walk away.
For the rest of the morning, I spend every free moment not haunted by the memory of my side-by-side photos checking myself out in reflections, from mirrors to windows of parked cars full of Wendy’s wrappers. Why? Because, somehow, by some delirious turn of fate, I have never looked better! Each new glance bolsters my confidence tenfold, my cockiness growing exponentially like the Grinch’s heart at the end of the story.
I am snapped like a glo-stick and no longer feeling flawed or broken or witchy (in a bad way). I am suddenly an actress at Cannes, a warrior princess, a socialite in the Hamptons, a muse for Eckhaus Latta pulled off the street, a tanned smoking French mother making a tarte au pomme on a family vacation to the Amalfi Coast. Like a narcissistic miracle, I am everything beautiful and interesting and special all at once, and all it took to realize it was an It’s A Wonderful Life moment of sorts on the screen of an iPad. And what’s really great is that affect really hasn’t worn off! Thanks to Dr. _______’s inadvertent reverse psychology, I truly do believe I’m better than you! Believe that!
The moral of the story is even the most perfect, beautiful, amazing people like yours truly have perceived flaws and things they hate about themselves. My nose issue is not my only insecurity, and it is not the only thing about my appearance that has made me cry, not by a long shot. The world is not always kind or fair, especially when it comes to the little differences we base our whole skewed self-concepts around.
But I guess my very hot, never-been-told take is that those differences are what make you not only special, but make you you! In the age of Instagram Face, it’s easy to lose sight of that, but it’s no less true than it was before FaceTune. I didn’t realize this before, but there’s something very strange and potentially damaging about willingly removing a part of yourself, even if it’s a part you think you don’t like. Get all the fillers and botox and boob jobs you want, but proceed with caution before you cut something off in the name of vanity. Chances are, you’re perfectly whole as is. And maybe even sexy.
Like me! 😉
(Footnote: The intent of this little personally essay was not to come across as being overtly holier-than-thou, triggering, or anti-cosmetic procedures. I also don’t want it to serve as some unwritten contract that I’ll never get any work done someday, because let’s be honest, I watch too much Real Housewives not to. At the very least, I’ll probably get my internal nose issues fixed, because breathing actually is really difficult and I sn*re. It also wasn’t my intent to reference How the Grinch Stole Christmas twice, but c’est la vie. Thank you for making it this far, now go love yourself please) XX