I Got a Nose Job at 16
And It Was All Your Fault.
WAYNE, N.J. 2016 – As I sit in this Chinese restaurant, eyes glued to the Lazy Susan suspensefully spinning in its endless time loop, I feel… regret. Shame? Embarrassment? My friends are texting and calling nonstop, just dying to see if it was real. I open the camera app on my iPhone 6 to see if I look any better. My eyes, puffed up from sobbing for the last hour and a half, and my lips? Puffed up from sucking on a glass.
Yes, I, too, fell victim to the infamous #KylieJennerLipChallenge. A bright red circle stretched from my nostrils to the bottom of my chin, showcasing my popped blood vessels to all those observant enough to look up from their soup dumplings for a chuckle. Luckily for us, my bright red goatee was gone before we opened our fortune cookies.
For days, I wondered how Kylie did it. How did she manage to casually do that every day and blow my mind with her before and afters? Hours of research followed, and I realized maybe this wasn’t an everyday issue for Ms. Jenner. At the age of 17, she’d augmented her body to just look like that. Interesting.
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MONTCLAIR, N.J. 2020 – I got a nose job at 16. I don’t regret this decision. On the contrary, it opened my eyes to the stark reality we live in. Not only do I feel I look much better than I did once before, but I also choose not to let the “all-natural” claims of opposing public personas make me feel bad about my decision.
This decision was quick, but it was not easy. My plastic surgery journey began when I was very young. One of my very close family friends was a plastic surgeon that my mother would see from time to time. I cried every time she would come home with some sort of ice on her face or needle mark and would hug her and tell her how perfect I thought she was. Then, when I hit my teens, my friends’ older sisters would get their noses done, and I would gawk over the fact that they willingly went under anesthesia and got their faces chopped and sawed to perfection.
Then quarantine hit. According to psychologist Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychological Development, the ages of 13-21 are when we genuinely lock in our identities. We come to understand that we are our own people, and the things that make us unique should be nourished. At such influential ages, comparing ourselves to others is encoded in our DNA. We’re taught to hyper-analyze and judge people based upon where we stand in society’s normalcies. Being an impuissant teenage girl trapped indoors during the most critical part of her developmental stage, she is left with no one to look at but herself and the models on her timeline.
This is not a unique experience. I am not the only girl that was left to amplify her insecurities during the pandemic. Although, I am one of the few privileged enough to be taken seriously about this opportunity. Here I am, still not fully processing the plasticity of my existence, but I am able to recognize this privilege and am grateful that my family heard my voice and allowed me to take action.
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ annual Plastic Surgery Statistics Report revealed that Americans spent over $16.7 billion on plastic surgery in 2020, with Rhinoplasty being the most popular with 352,555 procedures. Fine, this bruises my individuality complex slightly, but I’ll survive. Standing next to the dozen 13-19 year-olds who received a buttock lift during the pandemic, you’d find me and 44,685 other girls who also went under the knife to enhance the appearance of their noses.
I found myself in a very tricky situation when it came to documenting my surgery. It’s incredible content, don’t get me wrong, but I was apprehensive about sharing it with an audience because after studying the TikTok algorithm for months, I knew I would be viral. It sounds hard to believe coming from me, but I honestly did not want people to know about this. I knew there would be gossip and judgments from people who knew me and people who didn’t. But what I also learned was that no matter what it took, I needed more followers. The adrenaline you get from being an overnight sensation is no phenomenon. It’s wired in TikTok’s system to give everyone this feeling at least once. After you get that buzz, it is impossible to stop chasing it- and chase I did. At one point, I had millions of views and likes to my name, and I couldn’t let the fear of whispers stop me from trying to turn that into billions. I beat my audience to the punch and cracked jokes, poking fun at the absurd thing I did. It felt as spontaneous to them as it did to me- it truly felt like one day I was the “Wicked Witch of the West,” and the next I was “Glinda the Good Witch But Brunette.”
To quote myself in a video made on August 23rd, 2021, only two days post-operation, “So I scheduled this whole nose thing literally three weeks ago, they had an opening in their schedule- why am I just now realizing that like they’re gonna take this off and my nose is gonna be different?? I’m struggling. Why am I just now thinking about this? I am literally so dumb. Soooo dumb”. And that was how I coped with it. But with this coping and uncertainty, I was able to foster a community for many girls who wanted to do the same thing or had done it but did not know how to understand it.
I can only speak for myself, but there should be no surprise that other girls my age feel the same way I do about our mid-pandemic pitfalls. I interviewed many girls at my school, some of whom want a nose job and others who have already had one, and they had a lot to say about the media’s impact.
The first girl I interviewed had always wanted a Rhinoplasty, but her parents disapproved. This desire first presented itself amid the pandemic. She went into detail about her struggles every day during online classes. She would log into class on Zoom, and the moment her camera turned on, all she saw was herself. With eyes glued to her reflection, it was too easy to pick out each flaw. We spent over 240 days like this—thousands of hours doing nothing but analyzing our faces. Once finally given a break to look at anything but ourselves, the modern girl takes to social media, where we scrutinize ourselves for looking nothing like what we see. Lip fillers, botox, cheek fillers, buccal fat removal, and nose jobs are all that are needed to look like these star-studded influencers who claim to be all-natural. I also sat down with an alum to talk about the multiple nose jobs she’s gotten in the past, elective and not. She stated she did it because she spent so much time on TikTok and was influenced by the girls on the app in juxtaposition to herself.
We need to be more mindful and should watch the media and its psychological effects on vulnerable youth. With time, good practice standards should be discussed within the corporate media world to help prevent kids from seeing and then comparing themselves to filtered and unrealistic media images. Screenagers see the unrealistic standard online and will stop at nothing to get this. I felt like a rabid animal just racing to the doctor’s office to fix myself when in reality, there was nothing that needed to be fixed. This is something that is much easier for me to see rather than to digest and apply to everyday life. If I didn’t undergo this plastic surgery at sixteen, I would be much more disappointed with what I see in the mirror than I am now. Everyone has things they hate about themselves; it’s human nature. A recipe for disaster is when you mix insecurity, along with the incredibly toxic beauty standards portrayed through social media, and finally, dip it in an all-natural aioli that will enthusiastically judge you for being plastic.
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WAYNE, N.J. August 31st, 2020 — I rose that morning like I did the ten mornings previous: achy and exhausted. I slept in my basement in one of those reclining chairs so I wouldn’t be tempted to roll over and smush my new schnoz in the middle of the night. This was the day I got my cast off. I floated to the office, sat down in the doctor’s chair just like I had seen all those other girls on TikTok do, and let this man remove my cast and the stitches from the inside of my nose. The mirror, placed ever so delicately into my hand, showed me exactly what I had been waiting for. My hair was greasy, and my nose was so swollen it was bigger than it was before the surgery, but I truly didn’t even notice. I was so confused by what I was looking at. So this was what my face would look like for the rest of my life? Just like that? I tilted my face to get the classic side profile and cried right then and there. The doctor told me it would take a year for my nose to heal fully, so I won’t know exactly what it would look like until then, but even still, I was overjoyed.
In the coming months, I was only focused on my exterior aesthetic. I would do my hair and makeup and feel the confidence I had never felt before. I felt a jolt of energy in my chest every time I looked into the mirror- it never felt real. I never felt real. My confidence changed me as a person, and it was noticeable. My friends and family would constantly tell me how much I was glowing. The altercation of one insecurity led to a chain reaction of beautiful things. Looking in the mirror was never something I even acknowledged; in fact, I typically avoided it. Of course, I’m no narcissist–there are still things I see in the media that make me want to crumble–but accepting the rare opportunity to get a nose job was a risk, and boy, was that reward worth it.
research
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plastic-surgery-cosmetic-procedures-covid-19-pandemic/
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a9555312/teenage-plastic-surgery-feminism/