Inside the World of Men’s Nose Jobs

I was about 15 when someone first disrespected my nose. It was during a mock German exam in our freezing cold, hellishly spare gym hall. A classmate glared at me, honking on a huge, imaginary clown nose. I loudly implied that I’d had sexual relations with his mother, which was both extremely childish and extremely effective. A nearby invigilator hissed like a mad goose.

From that moment on, I realized I had a nose that belonged on a coin. My dad said it was a Roman nose. A strong nose! Beak-like and bold, it is long like my father’s and wide like my mother’s. The worst of both worlds. And unfortunate, given they’re both very handsome people. I spent some time feeling insecure about my nose. Then, over the next 20 years, I gradually learnt to worry about other consequential things, like mortgage rates and the prospect of nuclear war.

For many guys, the ghosts of high school still linger—and with your nose sitting in the center stage of your entire face, perceived imperfections can cause a lot of teenage unease. “From a school age, I knew that I had a big nose, and I was very conscious of it,” says Ashford, a visual merchandiser in London. “I’d always avoid photos from the side, and people would mention it. It made me really kind of unhappy with the way I looked.” Ashford lightly toyed with the idea of surgery, and the feeling loitered well into his mid-20s. “At school, you just want to fit in. You just want the normal beauty standard. It’s the only thing people are really interested in.”

Countless other men have felt that way. It’s led some of them to seek out a rhinoplasty, the clinical term for a nose job, in a bid to look and feel better. Most procedures take around two and a half hours, and involve a surgeon reconfiguring the underlying bone and cartilage to shape a new nose. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons estimates that the average cost of such operations can is $7,637. That price tag is determined by the intricacies of the procedure, and recovery time that can last up to a year. Multiple parts need to be manipulated. Cartilage is removed, or grafted from other areas of the body (ribs are good, a surgeon tells me; an ear, not so much). It’s like disassembling a model plane that took months of a steady hand, glue and a scalpel, only to painstakingly put it back together to form something new.

Guys like Jaffar are happy with the results. As an athlete and goalkeeper at school, he suffered many direct hits to the face. “I don’t know what happened. Someone put the evil eye on my nose as a kid. I just always got hit in the nose, so over the years, it went crooked, with these two massive, almost like bony growths at the top of the bridge,” he says. “It wasn’t my natural nose.” Pair that with chronic sinus issues, and, at 22, he paid a visit to Dr Mohammed Elahi, in Toronto, with some specific criteria. He was nervous, too. Jaffar points to TikTok, and how there is never “anything chill” about a quick “male rhinoplasty” search. “I said I really just wanted it to look natural,” he says. “I didn’t want it to look like a fake nose and I wanted it to suit my Pakistani and Indian heritage. And he did exactly that, alhamdulillah. God bless, 10 out of 10.”