Breaking Down the Stigma Around Plastic Surgery

By Julia Bianco on July 8, 2013

Amanda Bynes has been getting a lot of attention from the media recently  for her open and candid tweets about the multiple plastic surgeries that she has undergone to fix webbing between her eyes, which she has repeatedly referred to on her Twitter as a “birth defect.” Scrolling through the comments on these articles has me conflicted—as someone who underwent rhinoplasty myself, do I condone what Bynes is doing to her body?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve hated my nose. It had a large bump and the tip curved down, making me look like a witch when I smiled. I always thought about having a nose job some day. My mother had gotten one when she was just sixteen, so I knew that it was a possibility. I felt that I would never be completely comfortable with myself the way my nose was, and the only way to fix it would be surgery.

Personally, I never thought plastic surgery deserved all of the stigma. Sure, some people went overboard, but to get just one surgery? It didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I wear makeup and straighten my hair, and getting a rhinoplasty seemed just like that— it was something that I wanted to do to make myself look and feel better. I still loved myself on the inside, but I wanted to change my outside.

A lot of people didn’t understand this. When I told my friends that I wanted a nose job, they didn’t seem to get my reasoning. To a person who doesn’t have one specific body part that they focus all of their hate on, the mindset of someone like me is very difficult to understand. For me, every time I looked in the mirror, I would only notice my nose. Every time someone took a picture of me, I would look at it and think, wow, you would be so much prettier if your nose weren’t so messed up. I fixated on it.

I know this isn’t healthy, but in today’s society, it’s very hard not to fixate on body image, especially as a teenage girl. In high school, there is just so much of a focus on looks. I was a very awkward teenager, especially in middle school, and I felt like the rest of my grade could never look past the pimply girl with frizzy hair and braces that I used to be. I thought fixing my nose might change that.

I didn’t start to think of rhinoplasty as something that I would actually be able to do anytime soon until two of my close friends told me that they were getting their noses fixed. It was February of our junior year of high school. I was completely blindsided. I knew that the three of us had always talked about it, but I didn’t know that they were really going to go through with it.

This was a big surprise to me. I had never seriously asked my parents for a nose job— I always assumed that they would just say no. But I figured if it worked for my friends, who had parents who were much stricter than mine, I should at least try.

It took a bit of convincing, but eventually my parents agreed. I finally got the surgery the summer before my freshman year of college. It was the first surgery that I had ever gotten, and it was a very strange experience. The idea that I would go into the surgery looking one way, and come out changed forever, was both exciting and terrifying.

The week after you get rhinoplasty, you have to wear a splint and tape over your nose. You can’t see anything— the entire nose is completely hidden by bandages.  Knowing that your face has been permanently changed but not knowing if it is for the better is a scary feeling. The fear that you may have shelled out a ridiculous amount of money for a procedure that actually made you look worse is constantly on your mind.

I couldn’t have been happier with the results when I took the splints off. The bridge was straight and narrow, the tip curved upward. It was the perfect little button nose I’d always dreamed of. I showed it off to my friends, compared it to before pictures. My self-esteem soared, and I felt better than I ever had before.

It’s been about a year since the procedure. I’m sure a lot of you reading this were expecting some kind of condemnation of plastic surgery at the end. You were expecting me to tell you that I miss my old nose, that I should love myself the way I am. But I don’t feel that way.

People always tell you not to judge a book by its cover. If what’s on the outside shouldn’t be a reflection of what’s on the inside, shouldn’t the reverse also be true?

My nose isn’t a reflection of me as a person. Getting plastic surgery doesn’t mean that I hate myself. Changing my nose doesn’t mean that I am going to change my personality. And being able to feel more confident in the way I look? It makes me more confident in the way I act.

That’s where the important distinction comes in. People often make it seem that loving yourself as a person means loving yourself inside and outside, just the way you are, but I don’t agree. I equate my getting a nose job to something similar to using a word-a-day calendar to learn new vocabulary. It’s not necessary, and you would be fine without it, but being able to get that extra boost, whether it be through a new nose or getting to sound smart by using a new word in conversation, does wonders for your confidence.

To answer the original question though, no, I do not condone what Bynes is doing. Bynes claims to need a “few more surgeries,” on top of the two or three that she has already gotten, and this is something that I just cannot support. Plastic surgery, just like anything else, can become an addiction, and that is what Bynes, and many others, seem to be afflicted with.

I’m personally very open about my plastic surgery, but my friends who had nose jobs aren’t, and I understand why.  When you tell someone that you had a rhinoplasty, especially as a teenager, they automatically assume that you are shallow and obsessed with looks, like Bynes, who frequently calls other celebrities ugly, and refers to being pretty as the quality that makes her better than everyone else. In a lot of cases, that simply isn’t true.

Here is a list of things that I love most about myself: my brain, my sense of humor, my amazing skills at Flow and Scramble, my awkwardness, my uncanny ability to remember names, my nerdiness, and my drive. I don’t pride myself on my looks above my personality. Assuming that all people who have plastic surgery are vapid is a stereotype that we need to strike down, and people like Amanda Bynes are not helping the cause.

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