Growing up in a plastic surgery world
A love letter to my nose and my Hispanic ancestors.
I hated my nose growing up.
It wasn’t because someone told me I looked ugly or that I needed to get a nose job. I just looked at myself in the mirror one morning and realized it was big and I didn’t like it. This thought pattern continued throughout my high school and college years. Whenever I’d take selfies or photos with friends, I was very self-conscious about how I looked. I always thought that I could never get the perfect image because the angle was bad, the lighting was dull, or the makeup wasn’t on point.
Then it occurred to me later on that the reason I hated almost every photo of myself was because I was staring directly at my nose. I never had a good side, they all looked bad to me and I always thought that the culprit was the nose. It’s big, it’s crooked, it has an extra bone on the bridge, and I would often stare at it in the mirror wondering and hoping that if I were to push it or maneuver it in a certain way, it would change.
I fantasized about getting a nose job.
For years, I would tell my family that if I ever had the money, I would get a nose job, or what is also known as rhinoplasty. I would stare at it in the mirror wondering what my life would be like if I just got it done. “I’d probably be a model”, I would tell myself. I’d probably look more attractive if I had a slimmer and slender nose, like the women I would see on magazines and runway shows. This inner hatred of my appearance started in my teens, around 2007, the same time when the Kardashians first entered the Hollywood scene.
I grew up watching these wealthy women transform from the normal everyday neighbors next door type, to glamazon goddesses without a single wrinkle displayed on their faces. After several years of the Kardashians living life on camera, I’m fully aware that almost every single part of their faces has had some construction done, which to their benign neglect, set the standard of beauty in American culture.
The reality is plastic surgery has been around for decades, since the early 70s, but I really saw the height of this lifestyle growing up. During the 1990s, plastic surgeons performed nearly 1 million cosmetic procedures, helping thousands of people keep up with the trend of emulating pop icons. It was something that was part of the culture, the need to look beautiful and stop any signs of aging in order to be accepted and loved. This is what I knew. In 2010, I stumbled on the People Magazine article covering Heidi Montag, the reality star on the show The Hills, who underwent major plastic surgery that completely altered everything in her body. She had ten procedures done all at once. I remember reading the article while waiting in line with my mother at BJ’s Wholesale Club thinking to myself “Hmm maybe I should have my boobs done too.” I was 21 years old.
The plastic surgery trend has now turned into a beauty standard for wealthy people. A 2023 report found that cosmetic surgeries increased nearly 30% in 2021 compared to 2019, and nearly 50% compared to 2020. The main motivator for surgery this time around is the desire to look better after the COVID-19 pandemic. My family on my mother’s side are big advocates of plastic surgery, including my mother. I remember traveling to Ecuador with her to get liposuction and sitting by her bedside helping her get into and out of bed to use the bathroom. She also recalls getting her nose done when she was a teen after a motorcycle accident. I had never seen a photo of how she looked before and had always assumed she was born that way.
I have aunts and cousins who have followed in her footsteps, flying to South America for a number of plastic surgery procedures, to come back to America as a brand new person. I was surrounded by this idea of massive body alteration as being a normal part of life, so why wouldn’t I drink the cool-aid and partake in my own plastic surgery transformation?
Yet something inside of me never took action.
I’m a big action person, whatever I plan to do, it will happen. As a wellness writer, I’m a big believer in putting your health and happiness as a priority, yet while I talked about getting a nose or a boob job, and how amazing I would look, I never fully pulled the trigger. There would always be some excuse on why I didn’t go through with surgery like not having enough money, or having no time to recover from surgery as a working mom. “Once I get my life in order,” I would tell myself “then I will get my nose job.” It was something that was put on hold, not important enough for me to do it now, always later.
Then one day while visiting my mother at her home, she was cleaning out some files and found an old photo of her when she was a teen. I remember her looking at the image for a moment and smiling. “This is what I used to look like”, she said as she handed me the photo. The moment I held the photo in my hands, I felt my jaw drop. There it was, my nose, staring back at me from my mother’s photo. I look exactly like my mother when she was a teen, before her surgery.
We live in a society that glorifies beauty, but certain types of beauty. It started off as an unspoken standard that was only highlighted in movies and magazines, but it started to get louder once social media began to overtake the world. When I grew up, I knew firsthand that if you looked a certain way, the world would treat you in accordance with what the masses deem you should be treated as. A perfect example is fashion: if you dress well, you will be treated well. But if you dress in an unkept way, you will be treated differently and not in a positive way.
Now that there is a growing awareness of different body types entering the beauty world, there’s still this underlying mandatory standard that shadows every corner of beauty, which is when I realized the issue.
There’s nothing wrong with my nose, but there is something wrong with a world that unconsciously tells me there’s something wrong with my nose.
A world filled with tabloids and diet culture that glamourizes a look of ambiguity and slenderness. And while this has always been the case, the effect it has on young people today has gotten worse. Body dissatisfaction has been linked to risk-taking behaviors and mental health problems in teen girls on a global scale. One survey of UK adolescents by Be Real found that 36% agreed they would do ‘whatever it took’ to look good, with 57% saying they had considered going on a diet and 10% saying they had considered cosmetic surgery. In America, teens start developing negative body image between the ages of 12-18 years which can include signs of physical activity avoidance, eating disorders, and dysfunctional exercise. Yet on the opposite end, teens who show a greater appreciation for their bodies are less likely to have the urge to diet or participate in cigarette or alcohol use.
With social media being one of the main culprits of beauty comparison, promoting positive thoughts and affirmations in teen’s body image should be integrated into their day-to-day lives in the hopes of reminding them that beauty is subjective. That we are not all meant to look the same, talk the same, and be the same. If that were the case, life would be very dull, unoriginal, and quite frankly boring. Just like we need different minds to solve those mysterious problems of the Universe, we need different standards of beauty.
This idea of beauty is embedded in our mind and it’s your duty to shift it.
During a Style Like U interview with Stacy London, a fashion stylist and editor, she was asked what her favorite part about her body is and after a slight pause, she answered her nose: “My whole life everybody told me that I should have a nose job and I kept thinking ‘But it goes with my face!’” That’s when I realized why I never pulled the trigger on surgery, because I knew deep down my nose goes with my face, and the thought of altering it wasn’t appealing to me.
My nose is my constant reminder that I’m always improving the way I view myself and my body. Now when I feel self-conscious about my nose, I look at actors or activists who have big noses for inspiration. People like Kathryn Hahn, Ruth Bater Ginsberg, Lady Gaga, Stacy London, Rupi Kaur, Babba Rivera, and so many more.
Sometimes I look at my face in the mirror and wonder if this is the face my mother would’ve had if she hadn’t gotten her nose job. How my face and nose are the original designs in my family line, acknowledging my ancestral Mestizos lineage with this schnozz given to me at birth. To say that I will swear off plastic surgery altogether, however, is a bit premature since I don’t know if my thought process will change once I approach my 60s. But for now, when I look at my nose, I see it as a continued on-off relationship with my inner critic, and in the end, I will still give myself a kiss in the mirror and walk out the door proudly.