“My recent nose gives me a powerful Roman nose; it looks just like the nose I used to be meant to have,” laments Adriano, a 32-year-old Latin American man who lives in Los Angeles. Or, reasonably, it looks just like the nose he originally had. You see, this just isn’t Adriano’s second nose – it’s his third. “I had my second nose job to correct the primary one which removed my hump,” he explains. The procedure Adriano underwent, reverse rhinoplasty, reinstated the bump he had removed 14 years prior – an try and realign himself along with his ethnicity. “I didn’t like how I used to be being portrayed to the world,” he says. “My first nose job left me with a pinched button nose [which] just didn’t go along with the remainder of my features.” 

Adriano just isn’t the one person undergoing a reverse nose job. In an age where the celebration of a more individualised beauty is proliferating, the procedure is becoming increasingly popular. “Over the previous couple of years I even have definitely seen a rise in patients who’ve had rhinoplasty and are actually wanting their natural look back,” says Los Angeles-based cosmetic surgeon Dr Alexander Rivkin. “Some feel like they now not seem like they’re a part of their family, some feel like they don’t seem like their ethnicity. They feel like their previous imperfections made their nose and their face look more natural and so they want that back.”

To revive the bumps and curves back into his patients’ noses, Dr Rivkin uses an injectable temporary filler to sculpt the nose over the course of two or three sessions. After that, patients can opt to proceed with temporary filler (returning each one and a half years) or switch to a more everlasting filler, with touch-ups every seven to 10 years to account for possible changes in skin, bone and soft tissues. It’s quick, could be performed within the office, and there’s next to no recovery time. But with prices ranging anywhere from $600 to $1,200, low-cost it just isn’t. It also carries significant risks because the unwanted effects of fillers can include skin necrosis (breakdown) and blindness.

As early as 1898, German surgeon Jacques Joseph was performing reduction rhinoplasty on individuals who desired to look less Jewish, and achieving an Anglo-Eurocentric aesthetic has remained a powerful motivation for the procedure since. For a lot of young Persian women, nose jobs are a rite of passage, and Jewish and South American girls are sometimes gifted nose jobs for his or her bat mitzvahs and quinceañeras, respectively. “The rhinoplasty nose 15 years ago was an over-sculpted, very delicate upturned nose,” says Dr Melissa Doft, a Latest York-based plastic surgeon, and this look has remained the dominant style since.

“I just wish to have the nose I had before back. It jogs my memory of my grandmother” – Dahlia

“I used to be only offered Jewish parts – so I got a nose job,” actress Jennifer Grey recently recounted in her memoir, while Dahlia, a 28-year-old woman of Pakistani descent from Florida got a nose job because she just wanted “to seem like the images of models seen in magazines.” Each got here to regret the choice. “I just wish to have the nose I had before back,” says Dahlia. “It jogs my memory of my grandmother.”

Bella Hadid also recently revealed that she regrets her much referenced nose job. In an interview with Vogue earlier this 12 months, the model opened up about her struggles to simply accept her appearance and identity growing up, resulting in a nose job on the tender age of 14. “I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors,” she said. “I believe I’d have grown into it.”

This sense, Dr Rivkin says, just isn’t unusual for individuals who had surgery as teenagers after they were insecure and feeling pressured to slot in. “Many patients had rhinoplasty at a young age and didn’t really think it all over,” he says. “But since then, they’ve grown into themselves and are more comfortable with their individuality.”

It’s individuality that has been championed and fought for by the body positivity movement over the previous couple of years, as cultural ideals have steadily shifted towards inclusivity and celebrating self-expression. This online movement, coupled with a more globalised world, has destabilised and undermined the wonder hierarchy that placed a Eurocentric aesthetic at the highest. For a lot of, beauty now could be more about standing out than fitting in, diversity is well known, and perfection isn’t any longer the aspirational goal it once was. “It’s exciting that patients are seeing that there may be a couple of beauty ideal,” says Dr Doft.

Beauty standards serve nobody and may often result in greater unhappiness. Rhinoplasty has the highest dissatisfaction rate of any cosmetic procedure, and numbers within the UK have been steadily dropping during the last decade, from 4,878 in 2013 to only 1,330 last 12 months. A few of this will undoubtedly be attributed to the rise in popularity of “non-surgical nose jobs” – for instance, procedures where filler is used to straighten out bumps temporarily AKA liquid rhinoplasty. 

But we will’t discount the impact of all of the work body positivity proponents who preach the unconventional act of self-love has been doing over recent years. “I believe it’s great that individuals are asking for a more individualised, unique look that’s more in harmony with their family identity and have gotten safer of their unique beauty,” says Dr Rivkin. “Diversity enriches our society and the life experience of the members of our society.”

Ultimately, it’s too soon to inform whether the reverse nose job is only a trend or an indication of things to return. Is it yet one more way that we’re being pressured to vary our bodies to suit contemporary beauty standards or does it show that, as a society, we’re finally embracing a wider definition of what is taken into account beautiful and rejecting homogeneous ideals? No less than one thing is for certain: within the words of Dr Doft, “the cookie-cutter nose is previously.”