Distinction Non Surgical Face Lift

Outer peace: The search for perfected self

When I was 16, that question burned much hotter. Along with a gangly body, cystic acne and braces, I had a nose you might liken to a beak or a hatchet, Groucho Marx glasses without the mustache. My mother tried to convince me I was just exotic, and I almost believed her until I overheard a boy saying I’d be pretty if it weren’t for the schnoz. After that, I started hiding behind my hair. In class or at stoplights, I kept my head slightly turned so no one would catch my full profile. Finally, my father called my bluff.

“If you hate it that much,” he said, “I’ll take you in for a rhinoplasty consultation. But really think about it.”

I thought about Jennifer Grey post-nose job (Baby’s still in the corner), the risk that I wouldn’t look like me. I thought about other risks, like anesthesia and complications. I thought about what it would mean to be the kind of person who subjects herself to surgery without the excuse of a deviated septum. I thought of the way I judged Michael Jackson and the lady down the street whose skin was so tight she always looked surprised. And in the end, I decided to make peace with my appearance rather than do something I could never undo.

As they say, I grew into the schnoz. For years I didn’t think about it. But at 31, I once again find myself holding my finger up to the bridge of my nose and wondering what if?

When I was a kid, the only cosmetic surgeries I heard about were face-lifts and tummy tucks. Now, we switch our belly buttons from outies to innies. We shorten our toes and dimple our cheeks. We can make our most intimate parts bigger or smaller; we can even change the shape of our eyes.

The American public is split on whether we should. Data compiled by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery shows that 51 percent of all Americans now approve of cosmetic surgery, and 67 percent would not be embarrassed to admit to their friends and family they’d had it done. Both ASAPS and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported that 1.6 million cosmetic surgical procedures were performed in the U.S. by board-certified physicians in 2010, totaling more than $6 billion.

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