It’s the season of the schnoz, the beak, the triumphant, prominent, unignorable honker. We have Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro. Barbra Streisand’s nose starring in My Name Is Barbra with critics describing her face right there on page one (“an amiable anteater,” “a furious hamster,” “a seasick ferret”). There is Lady Gaga in profile, looking like something on an ancient Roman coin. And, to keep things topical, there’s Rudolph.
It is also the time of nose jobs, both surgical and non-; it is the age of contour makeup and before-and-afters. As podcasters are fond of saying, two things can be true at the same time. Rhinoplasties were up 37 percent in 2022 compared to pre-pandemic numbers from 2019.
“Believe me, Lady Gaga not doing her nose is less trendsetting than every Kardashian having another plastic surgery every day of the week,” says Dr. Steven Teitelbaum, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Santa Monica who, as far as I know, is not the Kardashians’ doctor and can’t state this as anything resembling fact.
You know who can? Khloe Kardashian, who posted, “Thank you for my perfect 👃,” on Instagram last year. She tagged @drkanodia90210, who describes himself on his Instagram bio as the “king of closed scarless rhinoplasty 👑.” Dr. Raj Kanodia, a board-certified plastic surgeon in, yes, Beverly Hills, says he has nose jobs booked until June 2024, with patients regularly jetting in from London, Dubai, Moscow, and New York for his light, almost imperceptible touch.
This is not the era of the ski jump, the scooped, or the pinched nose, or anything cookie-cutter. Dr. Kanodia’s aim is to “preserve the character, preserve the natural beauty of the face and enhance it and not change it,” he tells me between surgeries. “My mantra is to fool the mother’s eye. You can fool the brother, the husband, the boyfriend, the father. But it’s very difficult to fool the mother’s eye.” Sometimes, he even fools the surgeon’s eye, bumping into patients who ask, “Do you remember me?” (rude). “It could be Paris, it could be Germany, it could be London at a restaurant or a grocery store.” Sometimes, he has to call his office for confirmation. “I should not be able to say, ‘Yeah, that’s a nose job.’”
When patients ask him for something more drastic, such as a “cute button nose,” he’s quite firm. “No, that’s not the nose I want to be involved with.” He uses the words “refine,” “finesse,” “a little touch-up,” and “a little brushstroke” to describe his work, explaining that the nose “dictates the character of the face, and it has to be in harmony with the rest of the face.”
It’s also a boom time for non-surgical rhinoplasty, known (disgustingly) as the liquid nose job, in which injectable fillers make the nose look straighter or less bumpy. TikTok loves them and their impressive before-and-afters, but Dr. Kanodia has a few words. “I cringe,” he says. “It’s a terrible idea.”
The procedure involves injecting above and below the bump to camouflage it so it “has a couple of sausages sticking out from the eyebrow, and that looks horrible,” says Dr. Kanodia. “The word ‘filler’ means you’re making it bigger.... So it does not make sense.”
“Believe me, Lady Gaga not doing her nose is less trendsetting than every Kardashian having another plastic surgery every day of the week.”
Dr. Christian Subbio, also a board-certified plastic surgeon, has made a mini specialty of liquid rhinoplasty, and even he agrees with much of Dr. Kanodia’s assessment. “If you talk to a facial plastic surgeon who specializes in rhinoplasty there is a good chance that he or she will just pooh-pooh [injectable nose jobs] immediately.” Surgical rhinoplasty “is the gold standard for a reason.”
But he’s also here for the people. And the people, or at least some of them, want a straighter nose without surgery. “It’s one of the most common complaints people have about their noses,” says Dr. Subbio. “They hate the bump. And all you’re doing is putting filler above and below, and now you no longer have a bump. You have a straighter line.” Even though some people (for instance, drkanodia90210) declare this makes no sense, Dr. Subbio believes in certain cases it does. “You’re adding volume in a way that causes an optical illusion, which can make the nose, oddly enough, appear smaller or at least less aquiline.”
Ah, but there are caveats, piles and piles of caveats. “You have to have the right patient with the right condition and the right expectations and the right injector with the right training,” says Dr. Subbio. And guess what: TikTok is filled with the wrong, wrong, and wrong. Dr. Kanodia estimates that 90 percent of liquid rhinoplasties “are being done erroneously and inappropriately.”
The risks are grave. “If you stick a needle in, you can inadvertently enter an artery. And if you push all that filler into the artery, you could necrose or kill off a big patch of skin because that tissue’s not getting blood supply,” Dr. Subbio tells me. There’s worse. Because the bridge of the nose is perilously close to the eyes, “eventually that filler can end up back in the eye,” causing blindness. To reduce that risk, you need a well-trained doctor who injects droplet by tiny droplet. “There are too many stupid people injecting now because anyone can do it,” he warns. In some states, anyone with half a brain can take a weekend course and receive a license to fill.
Perhaps you’d prefer to refine your nose without going blind. Imagine something easy, something wash-off-able, something called makeup. Kristofer Buckle is the unofficial king of contour, and he’s here to help. “I contour everyone’s nose to different degrees and for different reasons,” he says. “Kelly Ripa has a very cute nose, and it’s very straight, and I still contour it.” He contours his own lovely nose every day after applying foundation. “It’s my family nose. Although people accuse me of buying it.”
Buckle speaks to me from somewhere in Ohio, where he is accompanying Mariah Carey on her “Merry Christmas One and All” tour. In case you’re wondering, Carey’s nose is the beneficiary of contour, too. “You can make a nose straighter, more narrow, shorter, turn the tip up a little bit, all with contour,” he says. He shortens the nose by applying bronzer directly underneath the tip. To narrow it, he darkens the sides and draws a straight line down the center with Yves Saint Laurent Touche Éclat. “People get caught up with adding darkness.... But you have to combine it with highlighting,” he says. “It’s not magic if you see the trick.”
And yet, with all this hubbub, some people are rejecting all forms of manipulation, asking, as Barbra Streisand does on page 57, “Isn’t my talent enough?” My friend and colleague Christina Grasso, of @thepouf, found peace with her own nose when she watched House of Gucci, starring Lady Gaga and Camille Cottin in all their nasal glory. Sitting in an airport one day, she made a TikTok video of all her favorite noses, Princess Diana’s, Anjelica Huston’s, Sofia Coppola’s, and Florence Welch’s among them. It now has nearly three million views.
“Young women are so self-conscious about their profile,” she says. “It’s a huge pain point. I haven’t met many people who say, ‘Yeah I like my nose.’” As Grasso studied these women, she realized by not having surgery, “they took their beauty to another level.” As Diana Vreeland once said, “A nose without strength is a pretty poor performance.”
Tell that to the performers. Even though in Hollywood nose jobs are as common as kale, a handful of artists fear alterations that might erase their character. Joan Kron, the director of Take My Nose … Please!, a documentary about comedians and plastic surgery, met several who jumped at the chance of getting nipped and tucked, as long as they didn’t lose their sense of humor in the process. The movie centers around Jackie Hoffman, of Only Murders in the Building, as she contemplates a nose job, chin implant, and face-lift. She calls Kron after a consultation with one doctor, who shows her computer images of her face after surgery. “I don’t like that doctor,” Kron remembers Hoffman saying. “He wanted to make me too pretty. I made my career playing weird people, and I can’t be too pretty.” Spoiler alert: Hoffman goes through with most of the surgery, and she still looks like herself. At one screening, an audience member asked Hoffman if she regretted the nose job. She reportedly said that not only does she not regret doing her nose; she also went back and got her chin done.
Streisand’s critics eventually stopped comparing her nose to those of small animals—and even came to celebrate it. Still, she writes about a time when she considered getting “a minor adjustment” but worried that it might alter her voice. “Besides,” she writes, “I like long noses.” Turns out, her talent is enough.
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look