Battling Vanity and the Pull of Cosmetic Surgery

During a high school varsity practice almost 40 years ago, my face had a full-frontal encounter with a basketball mistakenly thrown at me from a few feet away. Ever since, my nasal septum has been oriented to the right.

This event didn’t change the appearance of my rather ponderous nose, but it left me mostly unable to breathe through the obstructed side. It also gave me an enduring sneer, which has sometimes been mistaken as a sign of contemptuousness but is really just one side of my face contorting to pull in air. As I’ve gotten older, the breathing problem has made restful sleep harder to come by, so I recently decided to have the anomaly at long last set aright.

Strictly a routine procedure, a surgeon assured me. Go in through the nostrils, remove a bit of bone and cartilage, clear the airway. It would be over in a few minutes and, after 10 days’ recuperation, I’d be good as new.

Then he pondered the extravagant thing between my eyes. “You know,” he said, “if you’ve ever considered doing something about the way your nose looks, now’s the time.” He could easily get rid of the bump midway along its length, he said. He could shave its sizable end and give it a jaunty up-tipping. He wasn’t trying to sell me, he added, but merely thought that, since I was going to be under general anesthesia anyway--well, he ought at least to raise the issue.

I’ve always looked askance at cosmetic surgery, suspecting that perfectly normal-looking people who submit to it lack something in the sense-of-self department. But, to my surprise, the surgeon’s words soon had me seriously considering it. I’d certainly endured my share of teasing about my nose over the years. Now here I was, looking into the bathroom mirror, turning this way and that, holding the tip of my nose up with a forefinger--imagining a sleeker version.

Such radical artificial beautifying has an allure to which few people are entirely immune. This seems particularly true in Los Angeles, the Rome of Self-Revision, where appearance is ascribed more substance than it is anywhere else, and anything undertaken to enhance one’s looks is not only accepted, but applauded and emulated.

No one keeps local or state statistics on cosmetic surgeries (the American Society of Plastic Surgeons does only national surveys that estimate, for example, that 50,000 nose jobs were performed last year). But cosmetic surgery surely stands with the entertainment industry and real estate dealing as a pillar of the regional economy. Before coming here half a decade ago, I’d never seen so many advertisements for dashingly photographed face cutters, or run into so many people who’ve had their faces stretched, their noses cobbled, their rear ends tucked, their bosoms resized and so on.

The atmosphere breeds contagion. All this surgical prettifying, combined with the volume of natural beauty the entertainment business attracts to L.A., results in so many good-looking people being around that, even though you thought you’d built up antibodies living in more sensible places, you want to look better, too.

But can you ever be good-looking enough? The insecurity this preoccupation breeds has led to a very curious phenomenon here, that of even naturally good-looking people undergoing cosmetic surgery.

The downside of all this you can see in supermarkets and restaurants throughout the region: Ethnically dramatic visages rendered strangely mute in the middle by nose surgery. Old faces tugged into expressions of perpetual astonishment. (I’ve never seen so many beautiful young women, or so many grotesque older ones, as in L.A.)

In the worst cases, people (well, mostly a subgenus called celebrities) have been swept up in endless surgeries, whittling and whittling the margin between nature and some abstract notion of beauty, until they themselves begin to look like abstractions and have no claim to beauty of any humanly recognizable sort.

I, however, have been saved. After a long session of mirror-gazing and nose-fingering, I happened to contemplate an old framed photograph of my late father. I’d always considered him a good-looking man, certainly a better-looking one than either of his sons. I was struck by the thought that it was his nose that was writ on my face, his nose that I was considering pruning and paring.

It had taken untold generations of people in the mountains of eastern Italy--refining and refining and refining the concept--to present this nose to me. Changing it now could have all manner of unpredictable consequences. I could end up another subtle monstrosity created in the name of beauty.

So, I’m opting for just the internal surgery, which won’t affect what my nose looks like. I feel much relieved that the siren’s song of the beautifying knife has faded from my ears. Which, I might add, are perfectly shaped specimens by even L.A. standards.