Finished your A-levels? It’s time for the nose job

The formula for the perfect nose has been found, so get ready with your plastic surgeon’s telephone number as it turns out that the ideal nose is upturned to 106 degrees. Can’t quite picture it? Think Scarlett Johansson, Kate Beckinsale or the Duchess of Cambridge and you’ve got that curving cuteness of nasal perfection at precisely the right angle. This is not just a spurious fact pulled out of a celebrity encyclopaedia of nonsense: it has come from a comprehensive study conducted by Dr Omar Ahmed, of New York University, who says that not only does this angle render a nose a perfect objet d’art – it also has the power to enhance the rest of your facial features. But is the pursuit of such perfection healthy? And can there be such a thing as a universal ideal nose?


Kate Dobinson, a 25-year-old journalist, was 11 when she discovered that her nose might not be perfect. “A boy told me my nose made me look like Queen Victoria,” she says, “and I suddenly realised it was different and not the perfect little feminine nose that other girls had. It hadn’t mattered before, but from then on it really did worry me. It got to the point where I was always playing around with it, squeezing and reshaping it and turning the tip up in the mirror. I was so conscious of it that I wouldn’t let people sit to the right of me, as that was where my nose had a bump.”

Kate would have hated people to know she had such a negative obsession. “It was very private,” she says. “But still very much a fixation. I just wanted to stop thinking about my nose.”

When she was 21 and in her final year at university, her mother suggested the surgical route. “I don’t want people to think this is the only option,” she says now, “and it was an incredibly difficult situation. I worried about whether I would still look like me, but then I worried that I would look too similar to how I did before. I didn’t want to look like someone else, but after the surgery I had a sinking feeling, as I realised I was still me and I wasn’t prettier.”

Kate talks eloquently about the strong emotional connection people have with their faces and says that a change, however slight, is a significant and difficult journey. “It took me a year to realise that my nose job was a success, as it was all bound up in my emotional issues. But I now know that looking like yourself after surgery is actually the sign of a good surgeon and I’m so pleased with the results. I had to come to terms with my anxieties and fixations before I could accept my new nose.”