Several years ago, a magazine editor tasked me with an experiment on beauty standards, whereby I visited five top cosmetic surgeons in Los Angeles and asked what they’d do to make my face ‘perfect’. The idea? To see whether they’d say the same thing or whether 

their concepts of perfection varied.

Their verdicts were unanimous: my nose needed fixing.  It threw the rest of my face off-balance, they said. I wasn’t surprised or offended. I felt vindicated in my long-held view that my snout wasn’t quite right; a little too wide, too masculine, with a bump I could do without.

It would be a gross exaggeration to say I hated my nose or it made me self-conscious. I only noticed it in photos and even then, as someone moderately but not overtly vain, it annoyed me, but never consumed me. It was like driving a perfectly acceptable VW hatchback and occasionally wondering how nice it would be to buy a Lexus saloon.

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