HACKED OFF
How one writer really feels about her new nose
36
It’s a warm afternoon during the summer holidays and I am standing in the half-light of my parents’ living room. My father is watching television, his profile silhouetted against the glow from the screen.
It is the first time I have really looked at my father. He is a handsome man: thick auburn hair, liquid brown eyes and tanned skin. But, I am shocked to see for the first time, he has an… enormous nose.
“You really do have a big nose, don’t you?” I say, pointing at the strong aquiline nose in front of me.
He turns his head slowly towards me and smiles. “Well, so do you, darling. It runs in the family.”
Up until that point I hadn’t ever given my nose much thought. But that afternoon, as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, I gave it a lot. For the
“If I could fix my nose, maybe the grief would subside”
first time, I realised that the hawkish nose I saw before me did not match the small, delicate ones I saw in the pages of my favourite magazines.
In that moment, in that bathroom, I began to hate my face. I was 10 years old.
From then on, I blamed everything on that nose. The reason why my school friends hacked into my Bebo account and changed my name to “sheep shagger” when I was 12? My nose. The reason no boy at school showed any interest in me? My nose. The reason I would probably never make it in the competitive world of beauty journalism? Almost certainly my nose.
So, I reasoned, if the problem was the thing in the centre of my face then I could fix it. Simple. I could get some masterful surgeon to simply chisel it away. And then I would emerge, like the Venus de Milo, a smarter, more confident, more employable person.
Yet, despite being obsessed by the idea of rhinoplasty since before I could spell it, a small voice of dissent whispered, “But wouldn’t it be selfish to sculpt away the Roman nose so many generations of Taylors had been born with? Wouldn’t it be the height of vanity? Wouldn’t people judge you?” Two years later, that voice fell silent.
At 22, I was dealing with the fallout from my parents’ difficult divorce, during which I had become estranged from my mother, and barely had anything close to a relationship with my father. To make things worse, past traumas were starting to sprout again like wildflowers, including being sexually assaulted when I was 16. I needed a distraction. I found it in my nose.
I became obsessed all over again. I couldn’t bear to look in the mirror, and refused to have my picture taken. Things had become so bad that I took to holding my hand in front of my nose in conversations with new people. I became completely consumed with the idea that if only I could just fix it, then maybe all the grief, anger and pain I was experiencing would subside. After all, life seems so much less complicated for beautiful people. The final decider happened one evening while I was out on a date. The man I was seeing, exasperated with my constant wails, looked me square in the eyes and snapped: “If you hate it so much, why don’t you just fix it then?” I realised he was right. Suddenly I could see a way out.
The next thing I knew, I was digging out the copy of Tatler’s famous cosmetic surgery guide I had stashed under my bed, putting what I’d saved of my student loan to one side and dialling my way down the list of Britain’s best nose surgeons. The first had an eight-month waiting list, just for a consultation. The second: three weeks. Before I knew it, I found myself agreeing to the £250 fee and setting a date.
The weeks before the consultation felt like those restless hours trying to sleep on Christmas Eve as a child. But soon enough, there I was, sitting in front of surgeon Mr David Roberts having my photo taken. He took a picture of my nose, pulled it up on his computer screen and then, as if by magic, showed me the myriad different noses I could have. I could have long and elegant. I could have snub and upturned. I could even simply have the bump removed. In the end we settled on something delicate, something pretty. A straight, perky and perfectly proportioned nose. This wouldn’t just change my face, I reasoned. It would change my life.
At this point, I know I’m supposed to say that choosing surgery was a difficult decision, that I was deeply conflicted about renouncing the genetic configuration I’d been handed. I wasn’t. I paid the further £7,199 and within four weeks I was being laughed to sleep by an anaesthetist on a hospital bed in central London. Two hours later, I awoke, bruised and groggy with morphine, but with a nose as cute as a button.
The two weeks post-op were a haze of painkillers, bloody cotton wool and tasteless soup. When the bandages were peeled back 14 days after the operation, I waited. And waited.
“It’s perfect,” said Mr Roberts, finally. He held a mirror to my face. I agreed.
There were a few things I don’t remember being told about life with a “perfect” new nose. First, the salty-smelling liquid that would stream out of my nostrils at random (I still don’t know exactly what the hell it is). And the fact that I wouldn’t be able to feel my nose at all. Meaning every few minutes I had to hold my hand up to it to check it was still there. And then there was the obsession with every pore, every hair, every blemish that surrounded my new nose. It’s a bit like reupholstering the couch you’ve always hated, then suddenly, once it’s done, noticing how tired and crap everything else in the room looks in comparison.
And then the worst thing imaginable happened: six weeks post-surgery, I stumbled out of a nightclub one evening with my friend, Mabel. We were on the hunt for a McDonald’s when we noticed a man in a crash helmet following us. He became increasingly aggressive the closer he got. As I turned to confront him, he threw a right hook square in my face and ran away with the handbag I’d dropped to the floor. My passport, ID, keys and debit cards were all taken – but that barely registered. All I knew was that I’d just spent the best part of £8,000 having a nose job and there was blood all over it. Calling the police didn’t even cross my mind. Still in a state of shock, calling Harley Street and getting an appointment as soon as possible was my one and only priority.
Back in the clinic the following week, Mr Roberts told me the post-op swelling had saved my nose from breaking and I was incredibly lucky. But I wasn’t. Sure, it hadn’t broken but it was off-centre. Only a fraction, invisible, I suppose, to the naked eye, but it was there.
It’s been two years now, and yes, while I don’t have my bump any more or my strong Roman profile, I don’t feel “complete” (whatever that means anyway) in the naive way I thought I would. A smaller nose was never going to solve all my problems, of course, but I never thought it would create new ones. I taunt myself with the embarrassment of paying for a nose job that was only “perfect” for six weeks. I still analyse it in the mirror every day. But mostly I worry that in the pursuit of perfection, I have lost a vital part of myself. The salty-smelling liquid that drips constantly is an ongoing reminder that part of my face isn’t truly mine. As I’ve grown up, and entered the beauty industry I was so desperate to be a part of, my understanding of beauty ideals has grown, too. Now I look at icons like Erin O’Connor, Gisele Bündchen and Georgia May Jagger and see that sometimes having an unconventional feature can be your biggest asset. In a time of Love Island, where it feels like everyone strives to look the same, was eliminating my badge of Taylor identity a mistake? I am the first one in my family to take my nose, the ultimate family heirloom, and reject it. My kids might have my original nose – will they even look related to me? Only time will tell. As things stand, I’ve never looked like my petite, blonde, Irish mother, and now I don’t look like my father either. Without the nose that I used to mock him for, the one that was like a bridge between us, what clan do I belong to now?
“In the pursuit of perfection, I’ve lost part of myself”