Nosejob Dive

[Michael D. Workman]

Came across this interesting article, which immediately made me think of
the nosejob scene in _V_, and of our subsequent discussions of it online:

_Rhinoplasty Takes A Nose Dive_
Chicago Tribune, Wednesday, January 6, 1999

	New York - There was a time not so long ago when the Manhattan Eye, Ear
and Throat Hospital on East 64th Street was as chic a destination for
Christmas vacation as St. Barts or Telluride.
	That is where many teenaged girls would disappear during school holidays
to get the ethnic bump on their noses smoothed out So crowded were the
operating rooms at this time of year, recalled Dr. Gerald Pitman, a plastic
surgeon, that he would set out 20 sets of rhinoplasty intruments in the
morning and run out before the day was done.
	But the crowd is thinning.
	In the midst of an explosion in cosmetic surgery, the number of nose jobs
has dropped significantly. While the total number cosmetic procedures
increased 76 percent, to 697,000 from 395,000, between 1992 and 1996, the
number of rhinoplasties, as they are known, fell 8 percent, to 46,000 from
50,000. And the decline was probably steeper between the 1990 and the
1970s, experts say, although no statistics are available before this decade.
	The reasons are partly cultural and partly economic, according to plastic
surgeons who have watched the evolution of a procedure that was once a
benchmark in a young girl's life, especially among Jewish teenagers.
	"It was the thing to do," said Dr. H. George Brennan, who practices in
Southern California. "You had your bat mitzvah and you got your nose done."
	"The heyday for nose job, experts agree, was in the '60s and early '70s,
when the postwar baby boomers were teenagers. Parents of Jewish ancestry
who knew firsthand of Nazi atrocities were ever on the alert for stirrings
of anti-Semitism. They wanted their own children spared discrimination. And
to them, that meant fitting inconspicuously into the Protestant mainstream.
	"Jewish parents at that time didn't want their children to look Jewish,"
said Dr. James L. Baker Jr., who practices outside Orlando, Fla. "They
feared a stigma left from the war."
	The physical characteristic that most set Jews apart was their noses, and
so legions of teenagers, usually girls, had them fixed. The technology was
primitive compared to today's, and so the results, through the 1970s, had a
cookie-cutter similarity -- little ski-jump noses with the bony bridge
scooped away.
	But that was okay with the patients. "Everybody wanted to look like a
shiksa," said Dr. Thomas Rees, a retired plastic surgeon who trained many
of the high-priced doctors at work today along Park Ave.
	The leading practitioner back then was Dr. Howard Diamond of Manhattan,
renowned for standardizing what had been a hit-or-miss operation. "Every
girl on Long Island had a Diamond nose," said Dr. george Beraka, who said
he can still pick them out on women now deep into middle age.
	But fashion was changing. Ethnic looks were coming back into style. In the
mid-'70s, black models appeared for the first time on the covers of Glamour
and Vogue. Blonds were not the only ones having fun. Lana Turner and Betty
Grable were replaced by Barbra Streisand (who feared having a nose job
would change her voice) and Cher (who eventually had her nose fixed, along
with other body parts). [...]


Cheerio,

Michael Workman
Northwestern University
Department Of Cardiology
________________________________________________________________

"Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black
matter for the King that led them to it."

--Henry V, Shakespeare