A new piece in TNR, Iranian Chic, highlights the fact that nose jobs are all the rage in the Islamic Republic. A more detailed article notes:
One prominent Tehran plastic surgeon says his patients include the daughters of senior Islamic clerics.
Its use in the Islamic republic was officially sanctioned by Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's late leader and father of the Islamic revolution. He gave the go-ahead after being consulted by a religious figure whose daughter was due to be operated on by Iran's leading plastic surgeon, Mohammed Abidipour.
One of the main reasons offered for this fixation on facial perfection is that in Iran women can show their faces, but not their hair or figure (at least theoretically). So there is a natural tendency to fixate on the one region of the body which is a visible. Of course, that begs the question why nose jobs are popular with males in Iran as well. Additionally, I recently went to a Nowruz celebration with Kambiz, and the relatively liberal Iranian Americans unnecumbered by onerous morals legislation (head-scarf to cleavage ratio was 1:50) were obviously in love with plastic surgery too as evidenced by the presence of Latoya-Jackson-Face.
Below the fold a video report on the trend.
It's not just nose jobs that are all the rage in Iran.
I wonder whether the Iraninan government's largesse is indeed a compassionate accomodation of genuine confusion over gender identity or as the researcher is quoted saying:
Former FP researcher David Francis wrote, "In a country that shuns homosexuality, this makes perverse sense, as after a sex-change operation, one technically isn't attracted to one's own sex and therefore isn't gay."
To me the Iranian initiative looks much like what goes on privately and "voluntarily" in India among the Hijra (eunuch) community. Except here it is taking place under cleaner, more sanitary and medically supervised conditions with government sanction.
A movie has been made about this trend.
"So there is a natural tendency to fixate on the one region of the body which is a visible."
Quite so.
The Victorian attraction and focus on 'a well turned ankle', the uniquely Japanese attraction to female necks and the poetic focus of a Muslim on the 'swaying of the hajab' are all best understood in light of what remains visible to men. Lacking any exposed flesh or overt form men will happily get turned on over the slightest hint of feminine form.
Men are dogs. Always horny and always looking. Even if there is nothing to look at men will imagine and fantasize over what they can't see if it is associated with a woman. Mystery is an aphrodisiac and the mind is, even on us dogs, the largest and most sensitive erogenous zone.
Ironically the spot that seems to promote the least focus on the female body is, based on my experience, a nude beach. After staring for a half hour it gets old. It is much harder to idealize a woman you have seen in the nude, un-primped and not trying to look attractive.
Greg Cochran showed up in the comments to my Iran post linking to that story, here.
I've heard Iran's government also set up a pretty good organ donation system.
(head-scarf to cleavage ratio was 1:50)
Now that is an interesting social metric... Even better, it's probably a dimensionless number, being a ratio between two surface areas (covered hair vs. non-covered upper torso) - so no unit conversion problems. I suggest you immediately publish something on this before some social scientist tries to schmuck it from you! ;)
Anecdotally true of the Iranians (oops Persians) I've seen in California. Laser hair removal is popular too. These gals (and guys) don't do headscarf so it seems more like something that has caught on in their social circles.
Sort of like boob jobs and Japanese Americans.
in Iran women can show their faces, but not their hair or figure (at least theoretically).
Theoretically! The fly honies in that clip (and other Iranian news clips) style their headscarves to reveal at least half of their luxurious black manes, have their manteaus tailored to contour their bodies more closely, and wear more form-fitting jeans.
My hunch is that the value added to your attractiveness by getting a nose job shows diminishing returns as you move away from schnoz land: you really stand out from the crowd in Tehran, but by the time you get into Northern Europe and its offshoots, no one would think your new nose was anything special.
The prediction is that Persian girls in Anglo countries would specialize in their comparative advantage. Persian girls show off their booties here, and love making up their large moonlike eyes -- these being rare things among Northern Euros.
And just to clarify, this only applies to things like noses that don't really matter that much in attractiveness anyway -- Persians in the West will attack body hair because even though this too shows diminishing returns as you move out from furball land, it's a necessity for looking good.
The capital of Iranian-America is Beverly Hills, CA, so I presume that the norms and values of Beverly Hills, such as plastic surgery, have filtered back to Iran.