Raising Bridges

As it turns out, anyone can achieve a different nose without plastic surgery. The caveat: it won’t last forever.

- Joie Goh

THE VIDEO, AS SEEN on Facebook and shared by a makeup artist acquaintance, starts innocently enough: a beautiful Chinese girl, with large anime-like eyes, a pointed pixie face and an exquisite nose, slim and narrow at the bridge and pointy and upturned at the tip. I pause my scrolling, intrigued at how it will play out.

The girl smiles angelically and flutters her long lashes, and proceeds to stab through the bridge of her nose with a metal skewer. She peels her nose off with the skewer and begins to scrape at it, except it’s not really her nose that she had so brutally excised from her face, but a prosthetic one, created out of wax putty — the kind of material used to make theatrical facial prosthetics and realistic-looking scars and wounds.

The rest of the girl’s “reverse transformation” is de rigeur of typical makeup removal videos: false eyelashes and circle lenses taken out, heavy foundation and contouring wiped off, wigs and hair extensions casually pulled off. In the end, the bare face of the doll-like girl is revealed to be just as average as any other young woman one might see on the streets in Asia; one with almond-shaped eyes and a petite button nose, typical of many East Asians.

The video continues in a similar vein, chronicling pretty Chinese girls scraping off their putty noses and wiping off artificially constructed features. Amazed, I immediately share my incredulity to my friends list.

Most are similarly impressed. Many more demand to know what the putty noses are made of, and if it’s a new beauty trend. Another makeup artist friend posits that it’s most likely a prank, and that the noses are made from a blend of Vaseline, baby powder and foundation. It’s a basic, do-it-yourself prosthetic, he claims, adding that the effect will only last less than two hours in real life, and that it had looked realistic in the video because of the heavy filters used.