In a move that can be sincerely described as “Cher-Adjacent”, I was once placed next to Cher’s best friend at a dinner. Because I am a human with a heart, I love Cher. Furthermore, because at school I was viciously bullied by pale, blond girls for being too identifiably ethnic, I really love Cher.
Beyond her genuine talent – a Grammy, an Emmy, three Golden Globes and a Best Actress Oscar to prove it – two things remain key about Cher: one, her look was seen as pioneering, the first Armenian-American pinup until Kim Kardashian. Second, her iconic political posts on Twitter, where she rails against sexist double standards (as she always has, via all the mediums that have evolved through the decades of her stardom).
When sat beside her best friend, I had just sold my first screenplay, and couldn’t help but ask something my mother and I had spent years discussing: do you know who did Cher’s original nose job, the one she has in Moonstruck? So that’s how I ended up, in my early 20s, going to the doctor said to be the “ethnic rhinoplasty specialist”. If you had a bump, he kept some of the bump and he’d lift the tip, but only by degrees. He gave you the nose you already had, the next size down. Most people never know unless I tell them.
I began to percolate on rhinoplasty and activism and not getting caught out, after the supermodel and Palestinian rights activist Bella Hadid discussed with Vogue her regret at having her nose done aged 14, telling Vogue: “I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors. I think I would have grown into it”.
I thought about how much Bella Hadid’s “before” pictures looked like my Jewish nose from teen photos. Who would have predicted in 2500 BCE, when the Hebrews settled with other Semitic-speaking people in Palestine, we would one day be caught in a cycle of violence over ownership of land, and that those who made it to America would give away the same nose.
Bella Hadid frequently recalls her teenage self-loathing. It is quite a cultural headfuck to be, for this generation, the most emulated model on the planet, and also represent to them the permanent psychic wound of being the “ugly sister”. A kind of magic, like Philip Roth noting how, with Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, a Jew took the death of Christ and made it about the weather.
In the US, where Hadid and I spent most of our adult lives, Arab and Jewish refugees petitioned to be granted “white” status in the census – before they succeeded, both groups were classified as non-white.
On making it to the American middle class, many of my Jewish, Arab and Iranian girlfriends had rhinoplasty as a generational expectation. If the country your people fled to for survival is unsure whether you belong in the white category or the brown category, plastic surgery can be a subconscious reach for safety. As the writer Bess Kalb described well in Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, a biography of her Grandmother, she wanted Bess to have her nose “fixed”, as she had after fleeing the Nazis
“In a fickle environment where there are active would-be Nazis in government, I understand why the protection of being subsumed into legal and cosmetic whiteness draws people in,” says Dr Maysan Haydar. Dr Haydar is a professor specialising in 20th-century immigration and acculturation patterns from Muslim-majority countries – but she’s also just a New York friend who didn’t judge me when I was 23, recovering from rhinoplasty.
I didn’t have to spell out how humiliating it is to be vain, to want to fit in, but also to want to get away with things. In fact, many years later I returned to the surgeon after lip filler became a thing, but he declined to do it, saying: “You’ll go back to England, and people will be able to tell and they’ll laugh at you.”
Bella Hadid was mocked on social media for uploading a video to Instagram of herself crying for the Palestinian people. This is unfair. All interesting people reach for two things that exist in opposition, and that tug, whether lover or movie star or model, is what makes us look at them. That Gene Kelly can dance with an animated mouse and have stood up to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. That Bella Hadid can film herself crying tears for the Palestinian people that fall in a different way than if she had the original Palestinian contours of her face ought not make them dismissible. I say from my own experience: the thing I clung to most, that got me through at a time when I had low self-esteem, felt lost and worthless, was that I came from people who suffered terrible tragedy but continue to struggle and continue to exist.
And yet it doesn’t pass me by that two of the world’s most famous women from my tribe didn’t touch their features: Barbra Streisand and Amy Winehouse. Marisa Abela, the actor who will play Winehouse in the new biopic, has an Arab father and a Jewish mother. And a beautiful, untouched nose. The kind Bella Hadid lamented she would have grown into.
Abela, recently starring in Industry, happens to have my favourite face on TV right now. What am I so transfixed by? Her own visceral liveliness and struggle, plus her very visible ancestry, the carrying, with her own youthful glow, what came before her. She is two things at once, a magic trick – like being an ugly-sister supermodel, or making Christmas about the weather.
Emma Forrest is the author of Busy Being Free, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99
