Is Everyone Really Staring at Your Nose?

Hi guys, I want to talk about a very interesting phenomenon that you see in plastic surgery. Again, I've been doing this for over 20 years and I've seen everything you can imagine. But one of the things that I see time and time again is that people come in, usually before surgery, where they say, okay, my nose is droopy, I've got a hump, whatever it is, they're not happy with the nose. And they say things like, I think everybody's staring at me, I'm self-conscious, I don't like to take pictures. Sometimes after surgery, they say, you know, maybe the nose is too cute, too pretty, people are staring at me.

So there was a study done. Really follow what I'm about to tell you, because it'll blow your mind. There was a study done where they took regular people, and a makeup artist drew scars on their faces, made it look like a scar, and they told them, you're going to go into a job interview with this scar, and we're going to monitor how you do, your self-confidence, et cetera.

But guess what, here's the twist. Right before they go in, the makeup artist comes and goes, okay, wait, wait, wait, let me touch up your scar a little bit. And what they did was they erased the scar completely. But the people had no idea. They didn't have a chance to look in the mirror, so they couldn't tell. They walk into the interview, do the interview, and they come out, and then the study designers ask these people, how do you think it went? What do you think happened?

And almost all of them were very self-conscious about the scar they thought they had. And they said things like, oh, I think I was discriminated against. Oh, I think the job interviewer kept staring at my scar. Oh, I think they didn't give me a fair chance because of my scar. So every single one of them had all these issues, complexes, insecurities, excuses about the scar that, guess what, they didn't have. They thought they had a scar, but they didn't have it.

What's the moral of the story? The moral of the story is it's us. It's us internalizing these issues. The world is not staring at us. The world is not staring at a small little blemish or a slightly asymmetric nostril or a dorsal hump or anything. That's not what they're looking at. But we put so much weight on these little things. We make a mountain out of a small mole, and we think that, oh my god, the world is unfair to me, I'm being discriminated against, I'm self-conscious, everybody, my friends, my family, the guy in the car next to me at the stoplight, they're all staring at my deformity. Even when there is no deformity. So what do you think about that? Comment below.