Does 'Ethnic' Plastic Surgery Mean Denying Your Race?

With ethnic plastic surgery now a burning issue, Robyn Wilder asks if we are chiselling away our cultural identities.

- Robyn Wilder

I HAVE A VERY ‘ETHNIC’ NOSE.

It’s hard to say to which ethnicity it belongs – I’m a mixture of Mediterranean, south Asian and northern European – but it doesn’t conform to the buttony Caucasian ‘ideal’. It’s long and hooked, and ends in a bulbous tip that points sullenly at my mouth like a fleshy arrow. 

I’ve always hated it, and as a teenager at an all-girls school, surrounded by willowy types with cute-as-a-button noses, it didn’t occur to me that my knobbly version was part of my heritage; that generations of proud Italian/French/Nepali relatives had nobly borne my wonky nose through history. To me it was just ugly, and I began saving up for a nose job when I was 14: a prime candidate for what’s known today as ‘ethnic plastic surgery’.

It’s an odd term. While it is a phrase often used by surgeons to describe any cosmetic surgery for non-white people, it also – more controversially – refers to cosmetic surgery to make nonwhite people look more Caucasian. 

A woman’s choice to have cosmetic surgery always provokes debate; add race into the equation and it sparks uneasy conversations about perceptions of beauty and ethnic identity. There’s often an assumption that when people from ethnic minorities have surgery, they’re doing it to look more Western, whether it’s through Asian blepharoplasty – a procedure that adds an ‘extra’ eyelid to East Asian eyes to make them look larger or rounder – or the ethnic rhinoplasty (nose job) I dreamt of as a teen. The most infamous example is Michael Jackson, who thinned his nose and whitened his skin.