You might have heard the term “ethnic rhinoplasty” online recently. But in actuality, it’s not a medical term or exact procedure and can mean different things for different ethnicities. The idea is that surgery can change certain features, but keep others, like a hump on the nose or bulbous tip. It’s been an especially fraught topic within the Black beauty space for decades due to the nuanced relationship between racial identity and aesthetic aspirations.
With Black women, it has also been used to categorize rhinoplasties focused on reducing features such as a bulbous tip, a flat nasal bridge, and rounded nostrils, explains Dr. Richard Reish, a double-board-certified plastic surgeon who specializes in rhinoplasties.
This practice of lumping all ethnic nose jobs into one category can lead to a one-size-fits-all mentality that can lead to people not knowing what they are going to get, says Dr. Reish.
“The biggest issue in ethnic rhinoplasty is surgeons who really overdo the nose with this very surgical look,” says Dr. Reish. Which can result in a “very pinched and overly done look.”
TikTok creator Zuri got a rhinoplasty in 2025, which she referred to as an “ethnic rhinoplasty,” but what she was hoping for was a nose that looked permanently contoured. Shortly after that, she shared her experience online, where she was met with immense backlash and hate. Below, Zuri shares her experience getting an ethnic rhinoplasty and having her appearance picked apart by the internet.
I remember growing up and getting Ebony and Jet magazines, and looking at Christina Milian’s nose, and just thinking, Oh my God. I would love for my nose to look like that. I grew up in a predominantly white area, and the beauty standards were different from what I looked like, and different from the media I was seeing in magazines and on 106 & Park. When I was little, my childhood best friend, who was this blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl, asked me why my nose didn’t have a bridge like hers. Even then, I don’t think I saw my nose as something to change because I was so young, but looking back, what she said stuck with me.
As I grew up, I developed a love for beauty and makeup. I remember sneaking off to do my makeup in the school bathrooms before first period since that kind of stuff wasn’t really embraced in my culture as an East African woman. As I got older, I became obsessed with that full-beat, super-contoured, snatched-nose look. During 2020, when we were all stuck at home and spending way too much time online, social media really popped off with the whole facial-balancing thing. I really wanted more definition in my nose and the illusion of a raised bridge and a defined tip.
At that time, I didn’t think getting an actual nose job was a possibility, though, because I thought Black people didn’t get plastic surgery. I thought that was only for white women. It wasn’t until I started seeing my favorite Black creators like Jana Craig from Love Island and a creator who goes by Iconissue online post about their experience with what they were calling “ethnic rhinoplasties” after the pandemic that I realized it was something I could do. I did like my nose. I loved my face. I just wished it had a bridge and more definition at the tip.
So in late 2024, I started deep-diving on Reddit, Facebook, and Real Self and got serious about getting the procedure. That’s how I found Dr. Vicente Daniel Uc Vera. He is based in Tijuana, and since I had a work trip planned for the spring of 2025 in Mexico, I was like, Why not just get it done there and extend my trip? So I got my surgery on April 9, 2025.
By this time, I had also already had liposuction and a breast augmentation in the States, so I knew how costly plastic surgery could be in the U.S. In Mexico, they quoted me $5,100 plus travel and lodging, which brought my total to around $10,000, which is still less than what I would have paid in the States.
As far as the surgery itself, I didn’t get to see my doctor until the day of, which isn’t the norm, at least not for any of the other procedures I’ve had done in the U.S. But in Mexico, I didn’t even get to meet the doctor until, like, 30 minutes before I went under. Even my online consultation was conducted by his staff, which, looking back, I can see that wasn’t totally ideal, but I brushed it off as normal for surgery out of the country. When I did meet him, though, I liked his energy; he sounded very knowledgeable, and that made me feel very assured. Going in, I showed him some noses that I liked, like this Fashion Nova model, Yodit Yemane, and I also used the Turkish surgeons I followed as well, because they’re known for getting that snatched look I really wanted.
Part of why I picked Dr. Uc Vera was because he had done “ethnic nose jobs” and went to Turkey to get specialized training. To give me my bridge, he took rib cartilage from my side and placed it in my nose to create the shape. It was just two incisions, one from my rib, and then one put into my nose. He also snipped some of my nostrils and manipulated the tip with bone to give me some lift.
Right after surgery, I honestly felt fine, just like I had a stuffy nose or a sinus infection. I had to stay an extra ten days in Mexico for them to take off my cast, so I didn’t know what it really looked like at first. All I saw were the on-table pics he took of me right after surgery, which I liked. But once they took the bandages and the stitches out, my first thought was, Did I just mutilate myself? I didn’t want to panic because I knew it could take over a year to see final results, but at that moment, I thought it looked very piggylike. Just very swollen and upturned. I looked insane. So I started filming my experience and sharing it on TikTok, because I just wanted to put my story out there and, hopefully, have people resonate with it. I wanted to reach people who weren’t sure how to feel about their procedures at first, because I would have loved to see that. Pretty quickly, though, the videos started getting a lot of traction, which I didn’t expect, and a lot of it was negative.
Every video I posted showing my nose or talking about my experience was getting millions and millions of views, and the comments were crazy. People were saying, “Oh, you hate yourself. You want to be white. Your ancestors would be so embarrassed. You look like Michael Jackson.” Those kinds of comments were hard to read and really hurtful, especially because on my end, I was still deciding how I felt about my surgery. I knew I loved myself, and I got the nose for my own personal aesthetic and not because I hated myself or my ancestors like the comments were saying. But when I posted, I was still freshly post-op, and I was not liking what I was seeing in the mirror so far. So those comments definitely messed up my psyche a little bit, because it’s like, Oh, my God, maybe these people are right? I didn’t even really start liking my nose until five months post-op, so getting my phone blown up with hundreds of those crazy comments was just very overwhelming. Now I’m ten months post-op and I like my nose a lot more, but I’m still in that healing process, so I won’t see my final results for a few more months.
What really sucked was that I started seeing my favorite influencers talk about me and making YouTube videos with my face and my nose as the thumbnail. That was really disheartening, because these were women who had inspired me at one point. Thankfully, there were some influencers who were actually really nice and gave me tips to deal with all of the negativity. They told me not to reply to the hate comments and to just make a joke out of it. Basically, troll the trolls. It was pretty crazy to see how much my platform grew from all of that, but now, when I try to branch out and make content about other things, there are always comments about my nose, which isn’t what I want to be known for.
If I could do it all over again, I would still get the surgery, same doctor, same everything, but I would have put the phone down. Maybe read some books instead of posting about it online. Now, looking back, I really wasn’t in the space to be posting online, because I didn’t even know If I liked my nose yet at the time, as it was still so upturned, and it looked very swollen. But the tip has dropped a lot now and will continue to drop over time, so I’m much happier with my results than when I first posted. But looking back, I absolutely do regret posting it, because it made my healing harder mentally. I wish I just did the whole journey privately, off the internet.