Remember HotOrNot.com? It was one of the most highly trafficked websites of my youth. The name pretty much says it all. People uploaded photos of themselves, and users would vote: hot or not. Back then, we had a huge Dell desktop that lived in my brother Ardavan’s room, and before I could even touch it I’d have to hassle my mom to get off the phone to free up the line. At the time, the very existence of the internet was surreal and a bit exhilarating. I chose to use my first precious hours with it doomscrolling HotOrNot. I was there to train my eye, and as I did a pattern emerged: skinny symmetrical white girls in bikinis = hot, the rest of us = not.
When I was 14, someone created a website where you could vote for the hottest girl at my school. I went to an elite New York City private school called Horace Mann. It was both famous and infamous; to explain why, I need to set the scene. New York City sells itself as a haven for weirdos: inclusive and radical. It’s not. You have to be a certain kind of hot, rich and successful to play – the rest of us are just extras. It’s a city built on hierarchies with a small town’s penchant for gossip. People make the pilgrimage to New York because they believe, deep in their bones, that they might be the very best at something. In turn, the city remains in a constant state of flux, perpetually measuring exactly who and what is “the best”. There’s always a best neighbourhood, a best handbag, a best restaurant, a best play, and so of course the schools were measured up against one another, and it was agreed by many that Horace Mann was the best of the best. Or at least that’s what our parents told themselves to justify the exorbitant tuition fees.
The students didn’t just live on Park Avenue; they lived in penthouses on Park Avenue, where the elevator doors open up into the living room. It was shockingly overpriced, shockingly elite, shocking for about 47 other reasons, like the molestation of teen boys by a choir conductor who’d strut through the halls like he was Mick Jagger.
My parents put every cent they had into sending my brother and me to the best. They even took out a third mortgage on their house to make it happen. Having moved to America from Iran not knowing much about the country, the people, or the rules, they were confident that the strongest advantage they could offer was to send us to the same school as the children of the richest and most powerful, so we could mingle with them and then morph into exemplary American versions of ourselves.
It’s a strategy that worked for my brother, who was academically gifted and disciplined. He went on to Columbia University, then the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and is currently one of the country’s leading paediatric urological surgeons. I was never sure if I’d be able to return on that investment. It wasn’t just that I didn’t belong. “Not belonging” is too passive. You can not belong and still function in a place. I was a different species from the rest of them.
I knew I wouldn’t be on the Hottest Girls at Horace Mann website, but that didn’t stop me from checking it every time I was within 20ft of a computer. I felt compelled to track who was winning the Hottest Girls at Horace Mann as if it were the presidential primary. One day I got an email from an address I didn’t recognise. Inside was a link and nothing else. The link led me to a site with the header “The Ugliest Girls at Horace Mann”. The layout was exactly like its sister site, only next to the names were adorable nicknames like “the Slut”, “the Bitch”, “Butterface”. Most of the girls listed were actually pretty popular and conventionally hot, so I got the sense the site was an inside joke made to settle a vendetta. But then I saw my own name. Next to it, “the Beast”.
I knew I was going to be on that site the minute I saw “Ugliest”. I knew it instinctively, the way I knew liver would taste mealy, like an overripe tomato, before it ever touched my tongue. My name earned a whopping 42 votes, while the others had two or three each. It was undeniable: I was the only person on the list who’d made it there because she was legitimately ugly. Not a bitch; a beast.
You know when something bad happens, worse than your worst nightmare, and the pure drama of it fills you with a weird sense of satisfaction? Satisfaction laced in endorphins. There was something almost euphoric about the sheer intensity of seeing my name on that website. I felt starstruck, knowing I was watching a seminal life moment take shape before my eyes, as I refreshed the page every 30 seconds to watch my votes go up. Starstruck plus nostalgic for the life I’d been living an hour earlier, before I’d gotten the email. I’d always had a suspicion, but now I had empirical proof: I was the Ugliest.
I’d started to get the sense I might be ugly around 11, when adults began offering up unsolicited hair, diet, exercise and cosmetic surgery advice. It was about that time that I learned what “hot” was, and how it seemed to be the price of admission if you were a girl. Any woman who didn’t classify as hot was automatically relegated to being the butt of the joke. Or at least that’s what I’d gleaned from Howard Stern, who spoke on the matter for 90 minutes straight each morning, blasting through the bus speakers on the way to school. But it wasn’t just Stern; it’s in my blood. Iranians are spectacularly superficial. Presentation is everything. We subscribe to a “more is more” aesthetic: full face of makeup to go to the grocery store. We’re serving baroque, air-kisses on both cheeks, grass-is-greener-on-my-side realness. You can’t drive home from a party without going through a full breakdown of who got fat and who got old, like Mom and Dad are Joan Rivers’s fashion police and you’re their backseat studio audience.
Should I just go ahead and blame my mom? Sure, why not? She’s naturally thin and small-boned with a tiny waist and big eyes, and I don’t look anything like her. Actually, that’s not true: I inherited her flat chest. Growing up, people felt compelled to tell me how beautiful she was with a mixture of awe and shock, as if her hotness was a party trick I’d managed to pull off. Then they’d follow up with: “You know you look exactly like your dad?” They’re right. I’m a carbon copy: thick in the middle with a long forehead and feet so big I have to ask if they carry size 11 (UK 9) before I fully enter the store. The fat that should have gone to my tits and my ass accumulated in my stomach, which has been the focus of 80% of all my brain activity since 1996.
Nobody said a word about the site at school the next day, but from the moment I was crowned the Beast, my whole world shifted. Every room transformed into a hierarchy of hotness. They say beauty’s only skin-deep, as if what doesn’t make it to your face and ass gets redirected to your heart, but I sometimes wonder if it’s not the ugly who have the cruellest takedowns of their own ugliness (plus everyone else’s). Becoming the Beast made me superficial. Years passed, and even though I eventually grew into my forehead, lost weight and did two stints of acne medication, I still couldn’t pass a reflective surface without stealing a glance to catch what was staring back: woman or beast?
“Promise you won’t get mad.” For some reason my mom thinks this is a good tactic for presenting an idea that will 100% drive you insane.
“I’m not promising that.”
“Well, if you’re going to get mad, I’m not going to say anything.”
This is what makes her approach so clever. You know what she’s about to say is going to hit your ears like nails on a chalkboard, but you can’t do anything to stop it because now you absolutely must find out exactly how she’s going to offend you and what genre of offence it will be.
“You could use a confidence boost, and even though I don’t think you necessarily need it, I think it could help your mentality, so why don’t we just look into getting your nose done?”
I’m 19, and have returned home from my freshman year at college a self-pity zombie living from one nap to the next, measuring time through episodes of Anna Nicole Smith’s show, and marinating in the kind of heartbreak only a teenager could ferment out of a one-month relationship.
I’d just had my heart broken by Nisha (not her real name), an addict I met in a support group for self-harmers. The only proof I had that the relationship had even happened was one out-of-focus picture I’d taken of her while she was sleeping. I printed it off my computer so her face took up the entire A4 sheet of paper. I spent hours staring at it, scanning my memories of “us”, and trying to piece together where I’d gone wrong.
My parents tiptoed around me. I knew they knew about Nisha. I knew they knew I knew they knew about Nisha. But it was silently understood that the official stance would be feigned ignorance:
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just tired.”
“We should have your thyroid checked.”
“OK.”
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I don’t remember how old I was the first time my parents suggested I get a nose job, but it always felt like the opportunity was sitting on the table, waiting for me to pick it up. Iran is the nose job capital of the world. My mother, father, aunts and grandparents have all gotten nose jobs. In fact, it seems like a bigger deal to be an Iranian who hasn’t had one. It’s barely considered cosmetic surgery, on a par with wearing braces or highlighting your hair, only it’s for ever and has a 12-month healing period.
At first I’d thought I would break the cycle. At 16 (two years after becoming the Beast) I wrote an article for The Harriet, my school’s feminist zine started by a group of intimidating riot grrrl types who wore padlocks as necklaces. In it, I went “undercover” to blow the lid off cosmetic surgery and expose the practice for the evil crock of shit it was. Which means I went for a consultation in a place I found in the back of a fashion magazine, then wrote an article that consisted of one run-on sentence where I vowed I’d never get a nose job. Actual quote: “I’d no longer be Desiree, but Schmeziree – a weird fake version of myself.” The article was strangely prophetic, as the desire to no longer be myself was precisely why I finally decided to get my nose done. Whoever “Schmeziree” was, she had to beat the alternative.
That summer, I was receptive. My guard was down, and I was desperate to feel anything other than heartbreak. For the first time I thought: “Why not have cosmetic surgery? My face can’t get any worse.” But it also seemed a bit pointless, like Febreze-ing a landfill. The discrepancy between me and beauty felt so great I didn’t really believe a nose job would do the trick. Still, it was the tiniest bit of action I could take: one step toward a better life.
Knowing when to take my parents’ word as fact and when to push back is one of the things that has made being their child a complete mindfuck. Often, they’re right. When I was 16, my mom got up at five in the morning to take me to Central Park so we could wait in line for tickets to Shakespeare in the Park, where Chekhov’s Seagull was playing. The way some kids get about comic books, I was obsessed with seeing all of the plays on and off Broadway.
Chekhov was my favourite playwright; I loved the way the melodrama and each character’s self-pity crescendoed into absurd humour. It felt deeply familiar to me as the daughter of Iranians. Which is why my mom got up at 5am to wait with me in line in Central Park for the impossible tickets you can’t buy and must earn. As the sun rose, word spread through the line that we were too far back to get tickets. Everyone around us packed up and left, but my mom wouldn’t budge. I fought her on it. I was mad at the both of us for not getting up earlier, mad at myself for wasting her time, and mad at the lack of autonomy that left me unable to go to the park on my own. For hours I fumed: “We’re never going to get tickets!” And then we did. We were the last in line to get them.
“Have faith in your mother,” she always told me. I have a mother who makes things happen, and she doesn’t take no for an answer. She’s the kind of person who knows which cosmetic surgeon is best at which body part, and that’s why she chose the surgeon who was known for his noses. She also understood that she’d have to “trick” me into visiting his office. “Let’s go so we can laugh at the photos,” she’d said when we scheduled the consultation. As we sat in his waiting room, she rolled her eyes at a set of huge fake breasts in the magazine she was flipping through, as if to say: “We’re on the same team!”
But when the surgeon used Photoshop to show me how he’d thin out my nose, straighten the bump, and trim the overhanging bit at the bottom, we didn’t laugh, we marvelled. The change was subtle but undeniable: my eyes looked wider, my face a bit prettier. At the end of the appointment, I watched my mom and the receptionist schedule my surgery: “Just to give you the option. He gets booked up so far in advance. We’ll cancel it in a week, once you’ve had time to think about it.”
But we didn’t cancel it. And one stiflingly humid August morning I found myself at the Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat hospital with my thighs sticking to the plastic waiting room chair. I sat sandwiched between my parents, wondering what had gone through their minds before their respective nose jobs. It felt like an event – it felt fun. Nobody was fighting. We were all united on the same team for the first time in I couldn’t remember how long.
But the tenor changed once I was separated from them and taken past the “no guests allowed” door. I changed into a gown and was hooked up to the anaesthesia, but it wasn’t until the surgeon entered the room that the reality of what was about to happen hit me and I dived straight into a heart-pounding, tear-leaking, I-can’t-breathe kind of panic. I thought, I’m going to get a ridiculous, plastic Barbie nose, and it’ll sit in the centre of my face like a scarlet letter for the rest of my life, announcing: This girl was weak. This girl let her vanity turn her into a walking joke.
Why did I let my parents talk me into this? The nose jobs worked for them because they were already attractive, but I’m “the Beast”. After this I’ll be “the Beast” with a tiny fake nose. But it was too late. I’d made my choice by not making one. He told me to trust him, but what did this man know about girls like me? Through my tears I begged: “PLEASE DON’T MAKE IT SMALL! I’M TOO BIG FOR A SMALL NOSE!”
They wheeled me into the operating room, where the walls were covered with huge, horrifying photos of my face. Before your surgery, you have to go to a professional photographer to take headshots from various angles so the surgeon can remember what your face looked like before he sliced it open and started chiselling away. The last things I remember are the photos and the begging before the anaesthesia kicked in and I passed out.
In the recovery room, I woke up calm and grateful and high as a motherfucking kite. What is it about drugs that whittles away all the resentments until there’s just love? The first thing I heard was my mom’s voice: “I saw it before they put the bandages on and it’s perfect!”
Dad pulled the car around to the front entrance of the hospital for me like I was a goddamn princess. We stopped at a Korean grocer on the way home and I picked up all the snacks I could get my greedy little hands on. It was still light outside when I crawled into my parents’ massive marshmallow of a bed with its impossibly soft fresh sheets. It was like being wrapped in a cloud. Their walls were covered in floor-to-ceiling mirrors, so it was more like being in a cloud inside a jewellery box. The mirrors made it feel like you were watching the movie of your life unfold in real time. That day, I stared at my reflection and thought: “This is me on the day of my nose job, swallowed up in bed, blood thick and crusted up each nostril: happy.”
A week later, the cast came off, and two weeks after that I began my sophomore year of college. Nobody noticed I looked any different. I still felt very lonely and very ugly. Yet when I showed people my profile, there it was: a slope. No more bump.
These days, when someone finds out I’ve had a nose job, they always ask the same two questions: “Do you regret it” and, “Would you do it again?” No, I don’t regret it, and no, I wouldn’t do it again. I don’t think my nose job actually had that much to do with my nose. I was reeling from my first broken heart and my parents wanted to support me, but since my heart had been broken by a girl, we had to pretend it wasn’t happening. So they chose to give me a makeover. I went along with it, and for a few weeks in August the three of us were united for what would turn out to be one of the last times in our lives. In the years to come, I would come out of the closet, and they would file for divorce, but that summer we all pretended that mother and father knew best and that a nose job would do the trick of solving my “confidence problem”. I’m not mad that it happened. I’m grateful they gave me all of their effort and all of their love.
I’ve lived with this nose for half my life now. Like a tattoo, it reflects a moment in my life that’s come and gone. One summer I was 19 and heartbroken and I put my trust in the people who made me. They did for me what they would have wanted for themselves at a time when I was too scared to make my own choices.