If you have been on any social media site in the last few weeks, and have ever looked up anything at all to pertaining to beauty (so every teenager ever), you will have been inundated with cosmetologists and plastic surgeons analysing a celebrity face who’s undergone a ‘glow up’ (read: total transformation) and they will be speculating on what procedures they’ve had done.
I remember when my great-grandmother died, and I was at her funeral, staring at her lying in her casket. I was a child, maybe around ten years old.
My grandfather knelt in for his final goodbye, and broke down sobbing. He loved his mother, my emigre Baba Sokol, a jovial Belarusian woman who sowed her own clothes, made bootleg vodka, climbed onto her roof in her 90s, and mostly spoke Russian but cracked jokes in English to make us laugh.
As my grandfather was demonstrating his deep grief and his love for his mother, I watched intently, emotionally moved, in awe at such a young age of the significance of the moment.
I remember distinctly looking at her nose, at her profile. Looking at my grandfather, his nose, and it struck me: I have the same nose.
One day, I remember thinking, when I am lying in a casket like her, that will be my nose.
I’ve never had the desire to get a nose job. I have my Baba’s Slavic nose. It is not something I’ve ever wanted to erase or change. My nose is a part of my heritage. It’s a part of who I am.
To each their own, when it comes to noses and nose jobs.
But isn’t it something that women are changing their faces to conform to some kind of hegemonic aesthetic that not only erases their individuality, but their ancestral identity?
LOVE THIS - indeed, our individual features are what makes us special. If we all start having them ironed out by surgeons, it's going to make for a pretty strange race of humans!
I remember when my great-grandmother died, and I was at her funeral, staring at her lying in her casket. I was a child, maybe around ten years old.
My grandfather knelt in for his final goodbye, and broke down sobbing. He loved his mother, my emigre Baba Sokol, a jovial Belarusian woman who sowed her own clothes, made bootleg vodka, climbed onto her roof in her 90s, and mostly spoke Russian but cracked jokes in English to make us laugh.
As my grandfather was demonstrating his deep grief and his love for his mother, I watched intently, emotionally moved, in awe at such a young age of the significance of the moment.
I remember distinctly looking at her nose, at her profile. Looking at my grandfather, his nose, and it struck me: I have the same nose.
One day, I remember thinking, when I am lying in a casket like her, that will be my nose.
I’ve never had the desire to get a nose job. I have my Baba’s Slavic nose. It is not something I’ve ever wanted to erase or change. My nose is a part of my heritage. It’s a part of who I am.
To each their own, when it comes to noses and nose jobs.
But isn’t it something that women are changing their faces to conform to some kind of hegemonic aesthetic that not only erases their individuality, but their ancestral identity?
LOVE THIS - indeed, our individual features are what makes us special. If we all start having them ironed out by surgeons, it's going to make for a pretty strange race of humans!