MANY would agree that Persians are
among the world’s most naturally attractive people. Yet ever more of them are
submitting to the knife. It is common to see women walking Tehran’s streets
sporting a plaster on the bridge of their nose. “It’s just a thing everyone
does,” says one woman who had the operation at the age of 19.
Sitting in his brightly colored
surgery in Tehran, Ali Asghar Shirazi explains that the majority of women—and
an increasing number of men—are most preoccupied by the size of their nose.
“Iranian noses are generally bigger than European ones. They don’t want Western
noses; they want smaller ones.”
The phenomenon is perhaps surprising
in a country far more conservative than plastic surgery hotspots such as
America, Brazil and South Korea. But there is a good reason why Iranians have a
penchant for the alteration. “For ladies who have to cover themselves apart
from the face, it is the only thing they can show,” says Mr Shirazi.
Unlike Lebanon, another Middle
Eastern county keen on surgery, banks are not offering purpose-made cosmetic
surgery loans. Yet Tehran has one of the leading research associations in the
field. Although one state TV channel last year introduced a ban on cosmetically
altered actors, Iran’s rulers see little wrong with surgery. Perhaps this is
because Islam’s holy texts have nothing at all to say on the subject.
If Iranians start to get richer as
international sanctions are removed after the nuclear deal with America, more
people may want the operation. A standard nose-job costs around $2,500,
compared to twice that in America, though the range is from $1,000 to $10,000 in
a country where the annual GDP per capita is just over $5,000. And as Iran
opens up, Mr Shirazi, who has operated on people from countries including
Syria, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, thinks more foreigners may come for
reasons other than tourism and business.
edited from The Economist
