A Center City physician, nearing 60, didn't like the slight tilt to the tip of his nose. A former Israeli combat soldier, now a nightclub manager in New York, felt his crooked nose eroded his confidence.
A New Jersey teen, a star on the high school field hockey team, used to reach up, finger the bump on her bridge, and wonder if everyone was staring. And a Jamaican-born woman who loved her Caribbean features thought her nose was out of proportion to the rest of her face.
Today, all four have new noses - symmetrical, straightened, smoothed-out, or cartilage-enhanced, reshaped at the tip or narrowed at the bridge. Together, they represent the current face of rhinoplasty, a procedure no longer limited to a stereotypical clientele of Long Island girls who get nose jobs for their Sweet Sixteens.
"There's no longer just one ideal appearance for the nose," said Julius Few, a plastic surgeon in Chicago whose practice includes Latino, African American, and Asian patients. "There are many definitions of beauty now."
According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 252,000 people had rhinoplasties in 2010. Of those, 25 percent were men and 57 percent were over age 29. And as patient demographics shift - ethnic minorities accounted for 29 percent of all cosmetic procedures in 2010, up from 14 percent in 2000 - some surgeons have developed a specialty in "ethnic rhinoplasty," preserving the signature look of a patient's heritage while reshaping his or her nose.
"Everyone comes in and wants to look like themselves," said Robert Glasgold, a facial plastic surgeon in Highland Park, N.J. "They don't want to look like they had their nose done."
That was true for Bruce, a Philadelphia physician who asked that his last name not be given because of privacy concerns. A football injury in high school left his nose with "a little twist," and an earlier rhinoplasty was not successful, he said. "Everybody else said they didn't notice it. But I knew," especially when he grew a mustache that emphasized the asymmetry at the tip of his nose.
Three years ago, at 57, he underwent a second rhinoplasty. When he first looked at the results, one week after surgery, "it was swollen, but it looked good. It looked great. A lot of nose jobs look like nose jobs. With mine, nobody would ever be able to tell."
