Big noses are back. Now I'm trying to learn to love mine

Telegraph

10-04-2025

Mine is a face that never really stood a chance. My elder brother has a big nose, which he inherited from my father. My grandfather on my mother's side and my grandmother on my father's side both had big noses too. In old family photos, some of my bigger-nosed and bespectacled ancestors look like they are wearing those Groucho Marx fake-nose-and-glasses masks. Yes, I come from a long line of long noses, so guess what? I also got a large, straight and right-angular hooter, the size and proportions of a traffic cone. Don't stand too close to me, because if I turn around quickly, it may knock you over.
Mine is an annoyingly regular design, undistinguished by any proper, noble nasal code; it isn't Nubian or Roman, or aquiline. It isn't broken in some heroic and interesting way (a la Jason Statham). Instead, its bluff and steep architecture, wide and blowsy and inelegant, just sits on my face like a fleshy Toblerone. And I hate it.
But maybe I shouldn't. Perhaps I should learn to love it, 'own' it and use my defect, because right now, big noses are having a moment. Actor Paul Mescal recently claimed that his large nose was a key factor in helping him win the starring role of Lucius in Ridley Scott's recent Gladiator sequel. 'The nose that I absolutely hated when I was in secondary school – and used to get ribbed for,' Mescal told an interviewer, 'became very useful when Ridley needed somebody to be in Gladiator II.'
The money-making Roman snout follows in the aquiline slipstream of other bankable, big-nosed actors: Steve Carell, Bradley Cooper, Matthew Macfadyen, Jeff Goldblum, Andy Samberg, Liam Neeson, Adam Driver, Ryan Gosling, Owen Wilson, F Murray Abraham. Currently sniffing around the album charts are veteran goths the Horrors, their front man, Faris Badwan, the proud owner of a magnificent gothic bugle worthy of a Disney vulture. Then there is King Konk: Adrien Brody, the owner of a nose so large, busted and skew-whiff that his make-up artist on The Brutalist once tried to remove it believing the Oscar-winning proboscis to be a prosthetic. Big noses are big news.
Medical records acknowledge the fashion – the United States in particular is no longer obsessed with fixing its noses, and the number of rhinoplasties conducted by surgeons has gone down 43 per cent since 2000. Ten years ago, nearly 400,000 Americans were having their noses made smaller, slimmer, straighter and cuter. Now the annual figure is only about 225,000. And if you have had a nose job, shaving your Roman down to a ski jump, it is possible to reverse it.
Augmentation procedures break the nose bone and redeploy grafts of extra cartilage taken from the ears and bone from the hips, elbow or skull, remodelling and building it up to enlarge and widen the nose. These operations are particularly popular in China, where prominent, straight 'Western' noses with a strong bridge and wide nostrils are considered attractive and a sign of wealth and success. ('The big nose,' F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, 'always means brainy and well-educated'.)
Los Angeles-based cosmetic surgeon Dr Alexander Rivkin says he's seen a definite increase in patients wanting their natural look back.
'Some feel like they no longer look like they are part of their family,' says Rivkin, whose 'reverse rhinoplasty' technique restores bumps and curves into his patients' noses via a course of injectable fillers. 'Some feel like they don't look like their ethnicity. They feel like their previous imperfections made their nose and their face look more natural and they want that back.'
Would I ever consider rhinoplasty myself? Not really – my big farmer's nose is, at least, in some sort of proportion to my big, agricultural face – but my tortured, nose-ist inner voice did consider his children for a while. Remember that episode of Frasier, ' Roz and the Schnoz '? The one where radio producer Roz gets pregnant and has to meet the grandparents of the expected child? And when those grandparents arrive at Frasier Crane's apartment they both have huge noses. Sample dialogue: (Niles to the parents) 'You're going to a dog show?' 'Yes, We have two giant schnauzers'. And later, Roz, clearly distressed: 'I'm just sitting here thinking, what if my kid gets Rick's nose…?'
This masterclass of silliness, slapstick and otorhinolaryngology first aired in 1998, four years after my first daughter was born, a year before my second, and it remains my favourite ever episode of Frasier, but also one that gave me pause for thought. Would my beautiful children both be cursed with my family snout? I didn't want them to suffer like I had – school mates calling me hilarious names such as 'Concorde' and making reference to Monty Pythons' Life of Brian ('Blessed are the big noses…'). As they grew older, I wanted them to be able to kiss with confidence, too. When I was in my teens, a button-nosed girlfriend used to perform a goofy dodging motion with her head before she leant in for passion. 'It's difficult with you,' she'd say, grabbing the end of my schnoz and tweaking it. 'You're so… nosey.' Praise the lord – and Saint Blaise (AKA the Patron Saint of noses) – neither daughter has inherited the Mills muzzle.
A culture of front-facing imagery helps the big-nosed man get by. The actual owner of a schnozzle doesn't know his own nose too well, or get to see its full extension, side-on that much.
We live in a flattering, photogenic, straight-on world, where smartphone camera and Zoom lens shoot in portrait mode and no one – except the King, while on postage-stamp duty or the 'heads' side of the coin, or a crim posing for a mug shot in the cop shop after an arrest – ever needs to be seen in profile. And that means, unless we encounter them in real life, we don't get to know their nose size either. So it comes as a shock to clock it in off-guard photos and video conferences.
If your nose is big enough (like mine), you can actually see it though, with one eye closed, without a mirror, on your own face; a pinky pyramid, poking into your field of vision and blocking out any detail on the other side. When I'm lying down, my nose doubles as a sun dial. Small-nosed people do not have this advantage.
Sunglasses and spectacles won't create much of a diversion; the polished architecture of my bold tortoiseshell frames may attempt an illusion of snout reduction but, actually, the shades only make things worse, providing a sort of launch pad for the missile's nose cone, my nose sticking out from the bridge like a plastic fake.
Paul Mescal