‘Eiffel Tower’ nose job surgery booming in China

Embracing Parisian style is one thing, but would you want the Eiffel Tower on your face?

Graduates in China will do anything to get ahead in their country's super-competitive job market. "Anything" includes reshaping their noses to resemble Paris' most famous monument, the Local reports.

Posters advertising the surgery are popping up everywhere. One ad pairs an image of a young, blue-eyed, Western-looking woman with a perfectly sculpted nose with one of the Eiffel tower silhouetted in the background.

The cost: around 60,000 yuan ($11,000 CAD).

The pain: the surgeon uses a piece of tissue from the patient's forehead to enlarge the nose.

"We are influenced by the beauty of Eiffel Tower, we are not content to just add something to the nose, we reconstruct it," surgeon Wang Xuming, who performs dozens of the operations a month, tells AFP.

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"It's a classic monument, with an extremely aesthetically pleasing form, and we are trying to combine medicine with art," says an administrative worker in Wang's practice. "We hope this nose will become classic and will provoke the same feelings at the Eiffel Tower."

In recent years, there has been a 40 per cent spike in plastic surgery in China, in part because the Chinese believe a certain look will help them land a job.

Critics also blame the nation's obsession with Western celebrity culture on the popularity of cosmetic surgery.

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One 26-year-old student tells AFP that she underwent liposuction because she thought it would be easier to find work:

"Sometimes recruiters pay more attention to your appearance than your experience."

In China, record numbers of graduates are looking for work — seven million alone this year — just as the economic slowdown has created a shortage of white-collar jobs, leaving about 10 per cent of those recent graduates unemployed.

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"Some students face a lot of employment pressure after graduation, if their facial features are good, they'll have more chance of finding a job," says Wang, noting that his clients are almost exclusively female and from well-to-do backgrounds.

"We've had students getting the Eiffel nose, it's helped them a lot."

Would you ever consider going under the knife if it would help you land your dream job? @