How Radhika Sanghani learned to stop worrying and love her nose

I’m Radhika Sanghani and I have a big nose.

That is a sentence I have avoided saying my whole life. From a very early age, I knew my nose was ugly, because people told me. Once, while bowling, some teenage boys yelled ‘big nosed Indian’ at me (a factually correct, if horrible statement). Later in life, men came up to me in bars to tell me they had big nose fetishes. My well-meaning friends, meanwhile, told me I’d be ‘so, like, pretty, with a smaller nose’.

And the worst thing was, I agreed. I hated drawing attention to my (wide, crooked, bent) nose, and refused to speak about it anywhere except for the pages of my teenage diary. I began to do everything I could to hide it: from Kardashian-esque contouring to deflecting attention via big hair and glasses. I was skilled at adopting a flattering angle whenever I saw a camera. I’d quickly move my head so the photograph would capture my nose straight on, raise my chin and smile with my tongue pressing the roof of my mouth — all within seconds. I was so terrified of seeing my nose side-on that I could do this routine in my sleep.

Getting a nose job is something I have debated since I realised it was possible, aged 11. I’ve imagined my face with a smaller nose and the life that would go along with it: more confidence, more friends and more dates. But I never went through with it, even when my mum offered to pay for the surgery when I was 17. I was too scared. What if it went wrong? What if I didn’t look like me? What if I looked even uglier? If I’m honest, I’ve always used my nose as an excuse. To me, it was the reason I was one of the last girls at school to get a serious boyfriend, and why I wasn’t confident speaking to new people. I couldn’t bear the thought of having a new nose and then realising the problem wasn’t my nose; it was me.

And then suddenly, this year, everything changed. It hit me that this one insecurity had been ruling my life for 27 years. It had held me back from living my life to the fullest, to the point at which I almost turned down TV appearances to promote my work as a journalist and author because the camera would capture my face side-on. I knew I had to face my fears. So, after weeks of anxiety, I took my first-ever side profile selfie and posted it on social media with the hashtag #sideprofileselfie. ‘I’m breaking the big-nose taboo,’ I wrote. ‘Join me.”’