You can pick your friends. You can pick your nose. But you can’t pick your friend’s nose. But you can pick a new nose for yourself—if you don’t like the one you are born with, that is. You just might get chewed out on TikTok. Call it the self-agency tax, a price you pay for making choices about your body that may contribute to external stigmas. This becomes especially true if said plastic surgery is an “ethnic rhinoplasty,” a highly scrutinized procedure circulating the TikTok zeitgeist.
Social media and plastic surgery
Plastic surgery is one of the most contentious topics of the digital era. The battle between the perception of self-love versus our right to do whatever we want to our bodies to make ourselves happy has been an endless tug-of-war. In a socio-political system that rewards desirability and proximity to whiteness above all else, it’s almost impossible to make any choice about our appearance that’s void of any external components. Then, add in our growing cognization around internalized anti-Blackness … and you’ve got a bottomless spate of confusion, contradictions and unbridled judgments. It’s all quite confusing.
Can you love yourself and still get plastic surgery? Is plastic surgery anti-feminist? Does every choice a woman makes have to adhere to feminism? These quandaries have plagued large pockets of TikTok for years, but a recent video from Zuri.the.alchemist sparked up the discourse yet again. In her video, Zuri shared a video of her ethnic rhinoplasty journey, and the video, which now sits at four million views, was met with intense digital vitriol. From video stitches to negative commentary, the internet quickly expressed its displeasure with her new nose in categorically cruel ways.
“Whoever did this is a smooth criminal.”
“I just know Tim Burton don’t play about you.”
“Call the police.”
These were just a few of the comments found under Zuri’s video, but that was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. After she posted her results, she became the face of copious digital discourse, bashing her for “not loving” her features and complimenting her previous nose.
This, of course, presents an interesting contrast to the way Black noses are discussed in any other context. Bulbous, wide-nostriled noses are seldom praised in the mainstream, save for a few melodic shout-outs a la Beyoncé’s “Formation.” Rapper GloRilla experienced similar commentary after sharing her nose job earlier this summer.
Disingenuous outrage surrounding plastic surgery
By and large, the only time wide noses are praised online is post-surgical augmentation. This makes the heaps of discourse directed at Black women with rhinoplasties framed as promotions of self-love and “genuine concern” come across as disingenuous attempts to talk down on a woman’s looks without fear of backlash. Talking about a woman’s natural looks? Mean. Catty. Uncouth. But make fun of a woman’s appearance after a permanent surgical alteration that likely came after years of internal struggles, and for some reason, you’re just seen as a concerned member of the public who just “tells it how it is.” But the truth is, no matter how you dress it up or try to spin it as earnest discourse.
If the only time you champion Black features is after someone surgically alters a personal insecurity (no matter what external factors influence said insecurity), then your TikTok takes aren’t as insightful as you may have hoped they’d appear.
