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patients’ noses. Subtler implants have since come into style, and scarring is better understood, too. “It’s almost a given that a person of color will exhibit some degree of hyperpigmentation to their scars or even a keloid behind the ear after face-lift surgery,” Jones notes. “So we evolved our techniques.” Jones estimates that 25 to 30 percent of his practice, now located at a midtown medical spa called House of Beauty, is dedicated to treating scars in patients of color. A different kind of scar treatment brought Dr. Ferdinand Ofodile to plastic surgery. When Ofodile moved to the U.S. from Nigeria in the 1960s to study medicine, he planned to become a vascular surgeon. But a visit home during the Nigerian Civil War convinced him to pursue treatment for those deformed by traumatic injuries, congenital defects, and burns severe enough to impede locomotion, as when scar tissue fuses arms to the torso. Eventually, he returned to the U.S. and became Harlem Hospital’s chief of plastic surgery—and an expert on AfricanAmerican noses. He spent the early ’90s measuring the noses of Harlem Hospital patients, employees, and grad students (and a few cadavers) and discovering that African-American nasal anatomy was more diverse than previously thought. Fewer than half were the shape “formerly called the Negroid nose,” featuring a low or concave bridge and bulbous tip. Ofodile’s signature “ethnic rhinoplasty” involves the insertion of a hard silicone implant. He has a trademarked design called the Ofodile nasal implant, an undulating arc of silicone “suited to satisfy Hispanic and African-American patient needs.” Name-brand nasal implants, it turns out, are a hallmark of the ethnic rhinoplasty universe. “There is a lot of controversy. A lot of competition. People are just fighting for patients,” explains Dr. Oleh Slupchynskyj, inventor of the proprietary SLUPimplant, a squared-off sliver of silicone not much larger than a matchstick. (He calls his mini-face-lift technique the SLUPlift.) Raised by Ukrainian immigrants in the Waterside Plaza towers in Kips Bay, Slupchynskyj has a New York accent, a flair for showmanship, and even less concern for political correctness than the other surgeons. During our interview, he spins in a swivel chair in his basement office, periodically dropping back his head to balance a SLUP implant on the bridge of his nose, followed by Ta-da! hand gestures. As the visibly white owner of AfricanAmericanRhinoplasty.com, Slupchynskyj has been accused of racism. “Patients, they’ll ask me the same question: ‘How did you get into this?’ I’ll say, ‘Well, people started coming to me, early in my practice, and they were getting turned away by other surgeons.’ Nobody wanted to operate on these people. They didn’t care, they had enough Caucasian rhinoplasty patients. But I saw a niche market.” Ethnic rhinoplasty “requires a lot more surgery, a lot more technique” than “the Caucasian girl from Long Island coming to get a hump reduced.” His rhinoplasties are priced in the ballpark of $10,000, plus a few thousand more if he’s fixing someone else’s work. He directs my attention to one of his YouTube videos, in which Slupchynskyj yanks another doctor’s mangled nasal implant from the sliced-open face of a sedated black woman. Her facial expression is eerily peaceful. Why do white people fixate on the “Westernizing” elements of ethnic plastic surgery? While working on this article, I found that people of all races had principled reservations about and passionate critiques of these practices. But the group that most consistently believed participants were deluding themselves about not trying to look white were, well, white people. Was that a symptom of in-group narcissism—white people assuming everyone wants to look like them? Or is it an issue of salience—white people only paying attention to aesthetics they already understand? Or is white horror at ethnic plastic surgery a cover for something uglier: a xenophobic fear of nonwhites “passing” as white, dressed up as free-to-be-you-and-me political correctness? Regardless of whose face the patient idealizes, modern plastic surgery is often a matter of fitting in. First, each feature must “fit in” with the rest of the face; every surgeon I spoke to emphasized attention to proportions. Second, there’s the matter of any one face “fitting in” with the rest of the population. But fitting in where, exactly? There is a term of art for the attraction to that which is average: koinophilia. In nature, averageness tends to be a sign of health, and studies consistently find that composite images of multiple faces are rated as more beautiful than the individual faces composing each image. Blend 50 and it becomes even better. This phenomenon was first discovered by inventor and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, who also happened to be Charles Darwin’s cousin. In an attempt to determine which facial traits correlated with criminality, he created composites of mug shots—and discovered that the more mug shots he combined, the more attractive the criminals became. In the end, Galton failed completely at his stated goal of studying the criminal face, but he did make an elaborate map denoting towns in Great Britain where hotties could be found. A modern map of composite hotties would probably show them floating, vaguely, in the oceans between continents, as the cult of mixed-race idealism
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