Following My Nose

Even Though It Always Leads to the Same Place

Dear Friends,

When I was out having lunch with a few college roommates a couple weeks ago, I learned something new that made the muscles in my already-middle-aged jaw go even more slack.

It related to facelifts, and the information wasn’t pretty.

[Content Note: This post contains a short but gruesome description of a voluntary cosmetic procedure. It’s not more graphic than an average horror flick—but if you’re squeamish, here’s an earlier post you can read about why I call this newsletter A New Wrinkle. It’s about aging, too, but without any gross references.]

We’d stumbled onto the subject of cosmetic surgery because some of us had attended our college reunion the previous weekend. Lest you think we were being shallow, we were actually talking about how nice the reunion was for almost the entire lunch. Everyone at the big event seemed focused on meaningful things like kids, job changes, health news, divorce—not on how much we’d all aged. Still, when one friend who hadn’t attended asked if our classmates had held up well after decades, the answer was a resounding yes.

We just looked like older versions of ourselves. No surprise.

Nevertheless, we wandered into that sticky territory: Would any of us ever consider a facelift (assuming the money for it—and who knew how much they cost?) now that age was invariably catching up to all of us?

It was then that one of my friends dropped the bomb: the current gold-standard for facelifts is having a plastic surgeon put you under general anesthesia for five hours and rip your face off to work on the muscles underneath.

In other words, this was not my outdated notion of a facelift from my Gen-X youth, where Great Aunt Martha reportedly had a few nips and tucks. This was no staple-gun-and-done.

I had to double-check that I’d heard correctly.

Me: Wait. You don’t mean, like literally…

My friend: Yes, they literally take your face off.

I was squinting so hard at this point, I was probably making an even better case that I needed such a facelift myself.

Me: Wait. So, you mean they take it off-off?

My friend: Yes, off-off. They actually take off the skin on your face in one piece and put in back on when they’re done.

Well, I was certainly done after hearing this. Good thing I’d finished my avocado toast. Although it did sort of roll around in my stomach.

I mean, what the actual fuck.

Once we’d established how the procedure worked, another friend chimed in that she’d just spoken to someone whom the rest of us didn’t know who’d signed up for this… filleting.

The unnamed person was terrified in anticipation.

Uh, well, yeah. Yes!

None of us were judging, though. After decades, we’d all had various body parts succumb to gravity. But we all agreed that we would never voluntarily sign up for a Dr. Frankenstein project such as this. Too fucking scary. We intended to let ourselves age naturally, even though that meant accepting what we didn’t like. And even if it also meant taking some of the mirrors down.

Or maybe that was just me.

Anyway, on my drive home, I thought more about our conversation, and it brought me back to a question I’ve often asked myself over the years: Would I change anything about my appearance if I had all the money in the world and the procedure were less… dramatic?

Now this gets us into some interesting territory, right? Isn’t there something we all secretly wish we could change about our looks if there were no financial or emotional cost? And it didn’t involve ripping off our entire face?

When I thought about my own question, I realized that my answer had always been my answer. In other words, it had nothing to do with age.

It had to do with age-old insecurity.

My nose!

(Ok, so don’t go looking at my profile picture now. Do you honestly think I’d give you a clear picture of what makes me so insecure? No way!)

The truth is, my nose has dogged me since puberty, when I determined it was too big and bumpy to sit in the middle of my face without anyone noticing it. Thanks to my own genetics, I’d been blessed with a non-GMO zucchini that sat in an onlooker’s line of vision, especially in profile. It didn’t seem to change size like Pinocchio’s when I told a lie, but it still incentivized me to live honestly so as not to tempt fate.

Of course, being so self-conscious, I often fantasized about a nose job. I’d actually met some girls at a summer camp once who said they were getting their noses done when they were sixteen (what were we, twelve at the time??). But as a Gen-Xer who was also a city kid, I couldn’t relate to what they were talking about at all. I couldn’t imagine bringing up such a subject with my parents. My father would have thought the only nose you’d fix would have been a broken one, and even then, the only goal was to restore breathing.

Meanwhile, my mother had had a nose job (seriously?!?!?), but later rebelled by never shaving under her arms. So despite the hypocrisy (my sisters and I just rolled our eyes), she wasn’t the right audience. She’d gone faux-natch.

But to be more generous for a moment, my parents also did have big hearts, and I knew that. They would have said we love you as you are (of course they did!) and they also would have wanted me to be more self-accepting. Their message would have been clear: This kind of insecurity was worth rebelling against.

So, I fought myself, pushed away the ugly thoughts (both literal and figurative) and moved on.

But going back to the question I’d asked myself on the way home from lunch, where, exactly, did that leave me in the present?

Having reached an age when people actually changed their looks all the time, even ripping their faces off to do it, I could now think of my nose as a minor construction project. After all, lots of people would smooth out a bump in their own driveway.

Still, even though it was socially acceptable to make cosmetic changes and there were no longer kids to put through college, there was a lot of history I’d be erasing. Could an aging rhino undergo rhinoplasty without feeling like something was missing? Besides, I’d leave the people who love me feeling bewildered. They’d gotten used to my face as it was, even if I hadn’t. And they had to look at me more than I did.

Then the final realization, perhaps the most important one: my nose had actually helped keep me young. I hadn’t lost sight of my teenage-self. She was still as plain as the nose on my face.

So, by the time I’d reached home after my lunch, I’d come to the same conclusion I always did after a nose job had crossed my mind.

It wasn’t happening.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Should I happen to have an accident, my family knows to resuscitate me, but if my face gets messed up, they should also honor my version of a DNR: Definite Nose Reduction. Please, PLEASE give the surgeon the green light to shrink my bad boy down.

After all, there’s more to life than just breathing.

Before I sign off, I am a little curious. Would any of you change anything about your appearance if it weren’t complicated?

If you feel like answering that question, head on down to the comments! Or leave a comment anyway. I always love hearing from you.

xo,

D