Father's nose best

It didn't take long after my baby was born - a few minutes, if that - before the claim to physical features began. His hair is the color of my husband's. His eyes are the shape of mine. He has my husband's slanted eyebrows and luscious upper lip. And, hey, whose nose is that?

That last question is especially fraught with drama, since both of our families have their share of, shall we say, prominent noses. My own nose is no classic ski slope, and I grew up with an unhealthy complex about it: My parents used to warn me, half-jokingly, that it would grow a bump, so for a time I went to bed each night with surgical tape on the bridge.

My Italian husband, meanwhile, has the sort of nose that's often referred to as "Roman." More to the point, it's large. That's something I noticed when I met him long ago, and it didn't stop me from finding him adorable. Now that it's part of a familiar face, I hardly even see it, and certainly don't care. But my husband does. He's visited plastic surgeons, considering whether to change it. And he doesn't want to see it on our kids.

He's particularly worried about our daughter. At 4, she still has one of those adorable button noses that, I gather, serve an evolutionary function: to make children look cute and protectable, even in the throes of a Tyrannosaurus tantrum. But as she loses her baby face and starts to look like a bona fide girl, her features are beginning to mature. On a recent visit, my mother noted that her nose looked "long." That sent my husband into paroxysms. How would a nose like his affect the fragile self-esteem of a teenage girl?

It's sad to watch kids lose their innocence on all sorts of subjects, to give up their reveries about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, to discover that some people are up to no good. But the blissful unawareness of physical differences is particularly sweet, and it's disturbing to watch it disappear. One day, Ava came home from preschool with a new complaint. One of her friends had been bragging that she was taller. It was true; the daughter of two short adults, Ava's likely to be smallest in her class forevermore. We had to explain that "taller" wasn't "better," and that short has its advantages: You can easily slip to the front of the crowd at a concert. Now, we wonder if, a few years from now, we'll be having the same conversation with our son. We know families that have given growth hormones to their boys, expecting that a few extra inches will help them cope in a cutthroat world. (Yes, there was Napoleon. But when those presidents past and future gathered at the White House last month, their average height was hard to miss.)

Noses are even easier to change, and if Ava wanted a new one, she'd be in good company. My mother-in-law may have been the source of my husband's schnozz, but we'll never know for sure, since she had a nose job 60 years ago. I grew up with a slew of Jewish girls who had their bumps shaven and stripped. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, rhinoplasty was one of the five most common procedures for those 18-and-under in 2007. (The others were laser hair removal, microdermabrasion, chemical peel, and ear reshaping.)

I'm not naive enough to think that appearance doesn't matter, especially at that vulnerable age. I'm not opposed to plastic surgery in the service of self-confidence. But I also hope my daughter won't get to that point, no matter how the nasal mystery plays out. With her bright blue eyes and long lashes, her thick brown hair and porcelain skin, I'm certain she'll be beautiful, classically or not. And I wonder if some of those teenagers I knew, who emerged from surgery with teensy button noses, really needed the intervention. History is filled with ill-conceived nose jobs, like the ones that turned Jennifer Grey and Ashley Tisdale - once distinctive, unusual beauties - into cookie-cutter Hollywood ingenues. How are you to know if your new nose will make you feel better or turn you into someone you don't recognize?

By Joanna Weiss
Globe Staff

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com

Source

Laser hair removal is really at the top of common procedures for those 18-and-under.