“You would be so pretty if you got your nose fixed,” my mother said.

Fixed. Like I was damaged.

She introduced me to friends with a disclaimer: “My daughter wasn’t supposed to look like this.” She’d chosen my father for breeding because of his handsome face and long fingers, and she wanted her daughter to be a button-nosed pianist. My nose was huge, and I didn’t play the piano, and my parents are now divorced. Just saying.

My beak was big, without a doubt— lumpy, crooked, and, I dare say, stereotypically Jewish amid the sea of wealthy Protestants in our Illinois town (voted, in 1997, one of the best in the nation in which to raise children).

“Pain for beauty,” was my mother’s motto, as she warped my long hair into scalp-pinching braids. A former actress and model, she appeared in a few episodes of All My Children before I was born. When I was growing up, she couldn’t leave the house without asking, “Do I look beautiful? You’re not looking—look. Beautiful?”

My mom had convinced her frugal mother to pay for her own nose job when she was a teen; later, she had it tweaked twice to get it right. So when a salesclerk or waitress recognized us as mother and daughter, she was insulted. Her surgeries were supposed to have saved her from looking like me.

At her best, my mother has always been generous, fun, witty, and deeply concerned about me, and, in her way, she was trying to help. To her, a smaller nose would be one less obstacle to a happy future. But when she asked again and again if she looked beautiful, I’d burst into tears, desperate for her to tell me I was beautiful too.

And yet, oddly, when I wasn’t crying, I was also totally into my nose. I was convinced that it made me funny, approachable, quirky, Jewish; that my personality, my identity, and my relationship with my mother were all in there. Depending on the day, my haircut, the bathroom lighting, or whether a boy had asked me to a dance (and they did), I ping-ponged between feeling exotic and like a total freak. Still, I rejected a “happy puberty” nose job at 13 and a “sweet 16” rhinoplasty, too.

Yet by 2006, when I was 24, single, and working in film production in New York City, it became clear that my mother wasn’t the only one who reacted negatively to my nose. People stopped me on the street to tell me I looked like Barbra Streisand. Japanese tourists wanted to take pictures with me. Hairstylists told me I needed to play down my nose—“no offense.” I started writing down the unprovoked remarks in a journal; in one year, I recorded 59.

September 23, 2006

Gay man at a party in Williamsburg: “Damn, girl, why you never got that thing taken off?”

A woman overhearing: “I like it, don’t get it fixed.”

Her friend: “You’re Jewish, right?”

The nose hadn’t stopped me from dating, getting jobs, or making friends. But it was beginning to feel like some silly outfit I’d put on to annoy my mother. After years of defiantly building an identity around it, was I finally going to admit that I hated it too?

I went to see a plastic surgeon, who created a digital projection of the nose he could give me: scooped, small, with a slight upturn. The picture looked like another girl. And she was so pretty.

But I was worried. Would changing my nose change my identity? Would I lose the thing that gave me character? The doctor seemed amused. “Do you really think you are your nose?” he asked.

Well, yes. And this, I realized, was the real problem: My nose overshadowed what I loved about myself. After years of struggling not to be my mother’s mirror, it was time to be happy with my own reflection.

My surgery was in November 2007. My mother flew to New York and booked a hotel for us near the doctor’s office, where she drew me baths and read to me for the first few days of my recovery—the kind of mothering I had longed for. “Relax,” she told me as she replaced the bandages. “Soon you’ll be prettier than me.”

My new nose isn’t tiny, but it’s smaller, more sculpted. As one colleague said, “Now I can see your eyes, cheeks, and smile, too.” I hate to say it, but my mother is right: It’s the nose I was meant to have. I don’t have to make excuses for it or cover it with my hair. I can just be.

Asked why she used to be so cruel about my nose, my mother has explained that her own mother made her feel worthless. While that sad cycle helps me to understand her, it doesn’t excuse our past. Now each time she tells me I’m lovely, I feel the full force of its opposite—the stinging comments of my youth. But at least I believe her. I hate to admit how much that matters to me.

CHANGING FACES: THE NEWS IN NOSES


In the post-ski-jump era, the best nose job is one that looks like no nose job at all. According to NYC plastic surgeon Steven Pearlman, MD, who specializes in revision rhinoplasty (i.e., do-overs), spreader grafts—pieces of the patient’s own cartilage he inserts into the middle third of the nose—”create a smoother curve from the brow to the tip, with no ‘drop-off’ in the middle.” For patients with very thin skin, who were previously prone to the bony-looking “shrink-wrap” effect, Pearlman also adds ultrathin grafts of cartilage or tissue taken from the temple to the tip of the nose, a trick he refers to as “carpet padding.”

Photo: Three decades of gold standards, according to Toby G. Mayer, MD, and Richard W. Fleming, MD, the L.A. doc duo behind an annual most-requested-features list.


Scalpel-phobic? Injections of Botox and fillers temporarily smooth bumps, lift drooping tips, and add definition, says L.A.–based cosmetic surgeon Alexander Rivkin, MD. He perfected the profile below in minutes with two vials of the filler Radiesse, which lasts 10 to 12 months. For a long-term fix, Rivkin recently began offering the same treatment using ArteFill, a filler made of Lucite spheres suspended in collagen, which is shown to last up to 15 years.

Photos: Lewis: courtesy of subject; Kidman: Dan MacMedan/WireImage; Hill: Evan Agostini/Getty Images; Porizkova: Getty Images; remaining images: courtesy of Alexander Rivkin