The saga of the pandemic continues to have innumerable impacts on people all over the world. It seems that not a day passes in which we don’t hear about some change resulting from the pandemic’s effects. From the exacerbation of mental health disorders and COVID long haulers to people refusing to return to work, the pandemic is leaving its mark.
One seeming universal change is the great technological revolution available to ordinary people as well as organizations. This technological wizardry gives people the ability to not only communicate with one another and participate in meetings and other group discussions through voice but also visually. The downside to seeing one another is that people can also see themselves. People who didn’t like much about their facial features before the pandemic now spend hours looking at their own faces on various virtual platforms. Some people dealing with this “Zoom dysmorphia” don’t like what they see and decide to do something about it.
One of the most prominent facial features on a virtual meeting platform is the nose. Back in the 70s, one of my White friends had rhinoplasty. Before the surgery, her nose was naturally straight and narrow like many White people’s. After the surgery, the tip of her nose turned up slightly showing more of her open nostrils. I didn’t think that this was an improvement, but I kept my mouth shut.
On the topic of change and noses, I read an interesting article written by Mridula Amin for Quartz titled, Nose jobs: Breaking the beak. Assuming that a large percentage of nose surgeries are for cosmetic rather than health reasons, I was still surprised to see the following statistics:
2.5 billion: Number of uses of hashtag #nosejobcheck on Tik Tok
352,555: Nose re-shaping surgeries performed in the US in 2020
67.9 %: Share of total rhinoplasties that are performed on 19–34-year-olds
I would wager, with a great sense of certainty, that the number of rhinoplasties historically and currently have been to change the nose to be more like what is considered attractive in noses endemic to Caucasians, and that’s why “approximately 66% of nose job patients in the US are white.”
The Quartz article mentions that “ethnic rhinoplasty” is “gaining popularity among people of color that aim to preserve their ethnic identity with their noses.” The idea of ethnic rhinoplasty is confusing to me. If one already has a nose endemic to one’s ethnicity, why is it necessary to have nose surgery to preserve that identity? Confusing or not, it may mean that fewer people of color are wishing that the bridge of their nose was not as flat and that their nostrils were narrower.
In describing what he calls the “Instagram Face” ideal in The New Yorker, celebrity make-up artist Colby Smith says, “We’re talking an overly tan skin tone [for white people], a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African American influence with the lips, a Caucasian influence with the nose, a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern.”
The pandemic changed a lot of things, but it didn’t seem to change the fact that people still want to look like what the majority holds up as models of beauty. It’s at least encouraging, as one can see from Colby Smith’s quote, that today when people opt for facial plastic surgery or choose makeup to emulate what they see as attractive, there is ethnic and racial diversity.
Gwen Dungy 