In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut, the novel This Side of Paradise, Princeton student Burne Holiday declares his love of a pronounced proboscis. “The large mouth and broad chin and rather big nose undoubtedly make the superior face,” he insists. To him, it “always means brainy and well-educated.”
Perhaps it was Fitzgerald’s own (largish and pointy) nose that inspired him to give his characters big beaks. Jordan Baker’s “proud” one, for instance, is held high with grace and superiority.
One hundred years ago, it was a truly wonderful time for large conks. Then came talkies, extreme close-ups, color pictures, TV, and magazines. After World War I, plastic surgery found its way to California, and for subsequent decades the small nose was le nez du jour.
But now the loud and proud shape is back in favor and fashion, especially among men. Paul Mescal admitted that his even helped him snag the lead role of Lucius in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II. “The nose that I absolutely hated when I was in secondary school—and used to get ribbed for—became very, very useful when Ridley needed somebody to be in Gladiator II,” Mescal has said. It helps to communicate the strength and will of his character, who was sold into slavery and returns to Rome to restore his father’s legacy.
Mescal follows in the aquiline slipstream of other bankable actors: Steve Carell, Bradley Cooper, Matthew Macfadyen, Jeff Goldblum, Andy Samberg, Liam Neeson, Adam Driver, Ryan Gosling, Owen Wilson, F. Murray Abraham, and, best of all, Adrien Brody, owner of the handsomest, most olfactory wabi-sabi face in Hollywood. (“Up close his nose is a mesmerizing sight—long, elegant and bent to his left.” —The Guardian)
Truly, we are in the dawn of a second Schnoz Age. Medical records back up this theory. The United States, in particular, is no longer obsessed with “fixing” its noses—the number of rhinoplasty procedures performed in 2023 declined by 43 percent since 2000. Ten years ago, nearly 400,000 Americans a year had their noses made smaller, slimmer, straighter, and cuter. These days, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, there are around 225,000 of them performed annually.
Regretting your decision to shave your Roman nose down to a ski jump? You’re not alone. Dr. Alexander Rivkin, a Los Angeles–based cosmetic surgeon, has seen an increase in patients seeking their God-given faces. “Some feel like they no longer look like they are part of their family or ethnicity,” says Rivkin, whose “reverse rhinoplasty” technique uses injections of hyaluronic-acid filler to restore bumps and curves. “Their previous ‘imperfections’ made their nose and face look more natural, and they want that back.”
How does you knows that you has a big nose? Let your nasally endowed Air Mail Look reporter explain. Today we live in a flattering, photogenic, straight-on world. Cameras and mirrors are generally front-facing. Very few people—except for the royals who appear on postage stamps and coins—desire to be photographed in profile.
Nose size is one of those subjects that women don’t seem to talk about, but among men it’s a constant topic of conversation. My friends do not hesitate to call me hilarious, Runyonesque names, such as “Big Nose.” Really, that’s the most popular one. Maybe “Concorde” or “Beaky.” They may even reference a line from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, like “Blessed are the big noses.”
Other commentators will be performative—a histrionic duck when I turn around, as if my nose might knock them over like a swinging boom on a storm-riding sailboat. There will be wisecracks about keeping me away from the cocaine stash. You, too, will get used to this, and share your pain with your parents and siblings, 40 percent of whom will also have inherited the big-schnoz gene.
You might not be aware of it most of the time, but if your nose is big enough, like mine, you can actually see it, with one eye closed, on your own face. The pink pyramid pokes into your field of vision and blocks out any detail on the other side. Small-nosed people do not have this problem.
Sunglasses and spectacles won’t create much of a diversion. The architecture of the frames may attempt an illusion of reduction, but, really, it only makes things worse by positioning the nose like it’s on a launchpad.
The 21st-century rule for those of us in the Big-Nosed Brotherhood? Make like Adrien Brody and own it. Perhaps heed the wise words of Edith Piaf: “Use your faults, use your defects; then you’re going to be a star.”
But then again, Piaf once bullied her catastrophically conked friend, the singer Charles Aznavour, into getting a nose job. And how did Piaf react to the results of his surgery? “I loved it better before.”
Simon Mills is an editor at Wallpaper and a writer at The Times of London
