Welcome back to Learning Curve, a column where we unpack the complicated experience of accepting your own body in a world that doesn’t seem to want you to. In this edition, Nicola examines her combative relationship with plastic surgery—which changed drastically after she went under the knife herself.
Plastic surgery and I have never really gotten along. Even at my job here at Allure, where we cover cosmetic procedures extensively, she and I have kept our distance, smiling stiffly at each other from across the room when we make accidental eye contact but never bothering to actually talk to each other. What is there to say? I just always thought she was a little fake, you know?
Truthfully, I’ve pretty much always held the belief that plastic surgery is a cheat code people use to like their own bodies, and that it’s unfeminist to use that cheat code under circumstances that aren’t medically necessary. Undergoing elective surgery is expensive and painful, but it’s easier than embracing your so-called flaws, isn’t it? The plastic surgery industrial complex only serves to enforce the unrealistic beauty standard that makes the general masses feel like our bodies are unattractive or unworthy.
That’s what I believed, anyway, until I wound up tits out on an operating table, sinking into anesthesia-induced sleep so a plastic surgeon could make my breasts smaller and perkier. That’s right: I, a body-image columnist who preaches self-acceptance for a living, just got a boob job. Did I “cheat,” by my own standard? Yes. But I can’t deny how much it’s changed my body image—and more importantly, my day-to-day life—for the better.
Through getting a procedure I never thought I’d want or need, I’ve come to realize I wasn’t anti-plastic surgery because I had worked at having a good body image and wished others would do the same. Turns out, much of my attitude was actually coming from deep-seated insecurity, not just about what I look like but who I am and what I’ve been through.
Historically, I’d never spared much thought to my breasts. They’d been a little asymmetric since puberty, something I have in common with the vast majority of people with boobs. Though I didn’t like their lack of perkiness, they were relatively small in a way I appreciated. Through my late teens and most of my 20s, they ultimately remained the same… but by the time I hit 30, that mild asymmetry had taken a turn for the extreme—as in a two-cup-difference extreme.