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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Nose

For the proboscis-focused, with rhinoplasty options looming since birth, learning to love the face you are born with is not always easy.

I’m seven months pregnant and looking at a 3-D black and white sonogram that is supposed to reveal some clue about my future daughter’s face. I squint and turn the image upside down and try to decipher what I’m staring at; nothing resembles anything human except for a skeleton handprint that seems freakishly long for a fetus. “I hope she has your nose,” I tell my husband; my only wish for her other than good health. “I love your nose,” he replies with a laugh. I notice he doesn’t wish she gets my nose, either.

I’m scanning old photographs trying to figure out the exact moment in time when my nose, the exaggeratedly pointy, slightly asymmetrical bane of my existence, first sprouted. I come to the conclusion that the metamorphosis occurred sometime in the 7th grade, the same year I went from flat-chested prepubescent girl to generously B-cupped teenager. My newly developed chest got a lot of attention that year. But before I could revel in the way boys had started looking at me, my genetics decided to lengthen my nose by at least a full inch, too. I imagined small double helixes plotting inside of my body: “You think you look good? Let’s see you overcome this.”

It’s summer vacation and I’m at a zoo with my family walking around in floral biker shorts and a Guess T-shirt. We’re hiding under the shade when we spot a group of flamingos standing around a pond. “Hey look!” my brother shouts at me while pointing at the pink crowd in the background. “Your real family!” I glance down at my skinny knees before figuring out he thinks our resemblance lies elsewhere. My parents ask me to stand in front of my newfound relatives and direct me to bend my legs into a similar pose. “Now turn your face to the side,” my mom says. Click. A decade later, I dress up as a flamingo for Halloween. I wear a pink wig and paint the tip of my nose black.

I’m having a Caesar salad and iced tea for lunch at my aunt’s house. We’re joined by her second husband, a television producer, who used to be married to a Venezuelan soap opera actress. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend yet?” she asks, as if this were a choice of mine at 14. Her husband shoots me a glance of sympathy. Like most beautiful women in Caracas (and there are many), my aunt has had some work done. She’ll easily admit to it, too, although she’s never specified exactly what, or on which part of her body. Her two daughters, who have always had a parade of suitors waiting outside the door, have also gone under the knife. Where I grew up, imperfections were dispensed with, replaced instead with larger breasts, smaller thighs, and miniature ski-jump noses. “We were talking about you the other day and saying how pretty you are, Patricia,” my aunt tells me in between sips of her iced tea. “But we all agreed that if you just took off a little bit of length from that nose, you could be beautiful.”

I’m 16 and I’m wasting hours in front of a mirror, trying to imagine all the ways in which I could have a different face stare back at me. I press my finger to the tip of my nose and push it upwards. I jut out my jaw and purse my lips, thinking maybe it’s just that my other features are too small in comparison. I cover up the top of my nose with a piece of paper, fantasizing what it would be like to shave off all of that extra flesh from my profile. I stare and stare and stare and I finally remove the piece of paper. Yep . . . it’s still there.

I start looking into rhinoplasty. I wonder what kind of genius thought that name would be appropriate for this particular type of procedure. Someone tells me the way it’s done: A doctor peels off a layer of skin from your face, then takes a hammer and chisel to your nose, fractures the bone in half, and reshapes what’s left. Others start sharing different kinds of unsolicited horror stories, like the one about a girl that cried for weeks on end after they took off her bandages and she didn’t recognize her reflection. Another person apparently had to have all of the mirrors at home taken down because she couldn’t stand the new sight of herself. I wonder if either of these people had ever been called “rhino.”

I’m a senior in high school and one of my best friends has just told me he’s in love with me. We’re at a house party, sitting on top of a cooler filled with beers, and I’m trying to ignore what he just said. That year, we spend hours on the phone and hanging out in art class, where he’s talented, and I’m just wasting time doodling away. We talk about the people we’re making out with, and he burns playlists for me on CDs marked with black Sharpie pen. One day he tells me about a new term he’s just learned that perfectly describes what he’s looking for in a woman: jolie laide. I look it up in the Oxford dictionary. It means: ”A woman whose face is attractive despite having ugly features.” I remember this vividly as he’s drunkenly declaring his feelings for me on top of that cooler.

It’s 2005 and Ashlee Simpson has just gotten a fantastic nose job. I look at her before and after pictures in Us Weekly and I’m convinced I need to get one for myself. During a phone call with my mom, I tell her I’m determined to find a plastic surgeon. I have a long summer break away from college in New York that will be perfect for recuperating. “I thought you had grown out of this by now,” she says, disapproval in her voice. When we still lived under the same roof, I would beg her to take me to see a doctor: “My aunt says she’ll give you the number of her plastic surgeon, all you have to do is call!” My mother, who barely uses makeup, has a naturally straight smile, and has never bought an anti-aging cream in her life, would laugh, and tell me there was an easier way to fix my predicament. “If you believe you’re beautiful, people will see you that way,” she would say—as if it were that simple, as if it were magic. I must have worn her down after all those years because she finally agrees to book me an appointment.

I learn that it’s a myth that your nose and your ears continue to grow until the day you die. The real reason why older people seem to have such large features is because ears and noses are primarily made up of cartilage. As one ages, this elastic type of bone matter loses its flexibility and begins to droop downwards because of the effects of gravity. And so, the nose doesn’t continue to grow, it sags—as if that’s any sort of consolation.

A man in a white coat with a tersely smooth face and an unnatural hue of dark hair is shoving a magnifying lens up my nostrils. “Do you have difficultly breathing?” he asks, “Because you have quite the deviated septum.” He prods and turns my head up and down and from one side to another with his gloved hands that smell of latex. The nurse takes a photo of my face looking straight ahead; another one in profile, my least favorite angle. The doctor asks my mother and I to join him in his office, where he downloads the images and begins to play around with my nose’s appearance: slimming it down, pinching the tip, erasing a bump I had failed to notice before. “You have a very nice, thin nose,” he says, even though he’s deleting every trace of it in front of me. “The problem is that it’s too big, so we have to work a lot on bringing it down to a better size.” He puts the mouse down, finally, and shows me his finished work. I balk. I’ve seen that nose before on so many other people. I hate it. I hate the person looking back at me on that screen. I want to get out of that office as quickly as possible. We thank the doctor for his time and make excuses to get out of scheduling a follow-up appointment. We exit the building and I never mention a nose job again. I realize this was my mother’s plan all along.

I start a mental catalog of women with fascinating, unconventional noses: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Barbra Streisand, Sofia Coppola, Anjelica Huston, Anh Duong, Sarah Jessica Parker, Diana Vreeland. The late Vogue editor once said: “If you have a long nose, hold it up and make it your trademark.” I add my name to this list of women.

I’m 23 and dating a guy with a perfect nose. It’s straight and elegant and just the right size. He’s a photographer and he likes to take my picture when I’m caught off guard. One night he shows up at my apartment downtown and snaps a photo as I’m opening the front door. “I love this and I love you,” he writes in an email with the photo attached. In it, I’m smiling with my face turned to the side and the light of the flash has settled entirely on my protruding beak. I put it up as my profile pic on Facebook. “Bella!” my aunt writes in the comments.

I marry the photographer. Years later, our daughter has just been born. She has blue eyes and a button nose and looks nothing like me. We joke around that she might have been switched in the hospital somehow. My mother, who’s helping me figure out how to bathe her and rock her to sleep, thinks this is a good time to go through my old baby books. Under “Parents’ First Impressions” she reads out loud what she wrote back in 1986: “She looks a lot like her brother but with black hair,” she says. “She has a bit of a big nose, but every day you can see it less and less. She’s pretty!” Her head shoots up, her eyes widen, and she looks at me with a guilty face. We both burst out laughing.

Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day for the first two weeks of February, until Valentine’s Day.

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