Under the knife

MANY would agree that Persians are among the world’s most naturally attractive people. Yet ever more of them are submitting to the knife. It is common to see women walking Tehran’s streets sporting a plaster on the bridge of their nose. “It’s just a thing everyone does,” says one woman who had the operation at the age of 19.

Sitting in his brightly coloured surgery in Tehran, Ali Asghar Shirazi explains that the majority of women—and an increasing number of men—are most preoccupied by the size of their snout. “Iranian noses are generally bigger than European ones,” says Mr Shirazi. “They don’t want Western noses; they want smaller ones.”