Noses for sale
By Candace Dempsey
"You can't get your nose fixed," said my sister, the one who’d posed nude for Playboy. "It makes you look so ... dignified. So distinguished." "Just
what every woman wants," I said. Then I went right ahead and got it
fixed. That was 10 years ago. “Fixed" is a euphemism, of course. Like
most women, I hate to admit I've been under the knife. I like words
like "fixed" and "nose job," because they make my operation sound as
natural as a car repair. Which, to me, it was.
What "fixed" means is that a plastic surgeon slit open my nose. He broke the bone with a hammer and snapped it like a twig. He shaved off the detested bump on the bridge. Then he sliced and stitched, making my nose shorter and narrower, with an elegant tip.
Yes, I was awake during this ordeal, sprawled on an operating table in his office under local anesthesia. I went home right afterwards, my nose packed with cotton. All night I dreamed of suffocation. Believe me, I have no regrets.
My nose wasn't as long as Barbra Streisand's nor as bumpy as Sylvester Stallone's. No lover ever mentioned it even during the dirtiest fight. It didn't bother my husband or son. Nor was it a ridicule magnet like the protruding ears of a childhood friend who patiently bore the name "Daisy" all through school.
Still, I hated my "beaker." It just never felt like mine. I’d had a small nose until I was 12 and then came this hideous addition. It made me the soul sister of Amy March in Little Women, who went to bed each night with a clothespin on her nose. Had I been rich like Brenda, the gorgeous college girl in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, I would have gotten the nasty business done in my teens.
Since my nose restoration, I no longer cringe every time I hear "honker," "snout" and "big shnozz." My three brothers no longer greet me with "Nose, nose anything goes." Or "Be careful. You're going to spear me with that thing." Or "Watch it. You're using up all my oxygen."
"It's OK for me to tease you. I've got a real honker myself," explained my youngest brother, after reminding me for the millionth time that my nostrils flared whenever I laughed. This same brother, lead singer in a rock band, is quite popular with the ladies. When I told him that I was about to fork over $3,000 to my plastic surgeon, he was stunned.
"Why would you do something like that?" he said. He even accused me of having a "nose complex."
I pointed out that in this country we believe big noses give men a rugged and handsome look. Big noses on women remind us of crones and witches. Or of Pinocchio, whose punishment for lying was to acquire a nose like mine. Scrooges have big noses. People who poke into other people's business are "nosy" or "nosy parkers."
It's comical when awesomely attractive TV reporters (so many of them surgically altered) deliver horror stories about America's growing rate of plastic surgery. They show us blown-up photos of Michael Jackson's face. The melting nose, the rigid cheekbones, the plastic chin. They trot out the many modifications of Joan Rivers, Dolly Parton and Phyllis Diller. We never see plastic surgery's spectacular results. Why, for instance, do you think actress Mira Sorvino looks so damn good? Spared the painful details (think of the dental chair, only 100 times worse) we're told that one surgery leads to another, as surely as marijuana leads to heroin. Buy new cheekbones one week, calf implants the next.
Of course, there are plastic surgery junkies. Cher comes quickly to mind. But she seeks perfection. The rest of us want repairs. We refuse to let our worst features be the first thing people notice about us. Sure, I could have followed fashion mag advice and poufed up my hair to "balance" my features. I could have "minimized" my nose with elaborate war paint. But I was tried of compensating. Tired of making do.
Yes, plastic surgery is a vain act. But before the operation, I worried about everything. Would my son, then a toddler, be weirded out by the new me? (He remembers seeing me in bandages, but can't recall my old nose.). Would my friends be shocked? (They've forgotten, too.) Would I be violating my feminist principles? (Who cares? Even Gloria Steinem had her eyelids "done.")
I'm aware of the pressure put on women to perfect their looks. When I read Elizabeth Haiken's scary new book, Venus Envy: A History of Plastic Surgery, I was amazed by the new phrases doctors dream up to justify operations on women. "Bat wing deformity" on the upper arms. "Spare tire deformity" on the middle. "Violin deformity," a.k.a. "saddlebags" or "riding breeches" on the hips.
I accept Haiken's premise, that the American penchant for self-improvement has created a "run for the scalpel." But in the absence of addiction, I find this liberating. Plastic surgery has long been a tool of the rich. The press didn't sound the alarm until the middle class started demanding access to those swanky waiting rooms.
Not that I'm immune to plastic surgery snobbism myself. Last year my husband and I went to a party given by a woman who'd recently had breast implants. Flinging open the front door, she greeted us with a smile as sparkling as her clingy silver top. We couldn't help staring at her conical breasts. She didn't mind. Before her operation, she had gone around her office, asking people what size breasts she should get.
I was feeling smug until my husband reminded me that I, too, had been friendly with a plastic surgeon.
"Are you glad I got my nose fixed?" I asked.
"To be perfectly honest, it did look unfortunate at certain angles."
I love him for not telling me that before. Sometimes I find myself touching the bridge of my nose just to make sure the bump is really gone. And I'm more tolerant of other people's vanities. I don't need to understand why my hairdresser had her eyelids "lifted." Or why a friend had liposuction and, well, a bunch of other stuff.
They have their reasons. Reasons that, given our intolerant and looks-crazed society, I have no right to judge.
From UnderWire.msn.com