Plastic surgery certainly says something about us as individuals and perhaps nationally as well. A mass of people in a particular country choose to lift or resize busts or butts or brows for a variety of factors, some of which are shared. In an Economist article, the natural beauties at that publication assign the popularity of rhinoplasty in Iran to women having to cover everything but the face. That still doesn’t speak to why a smaller nose is thought to be more attractive or why so many Persian men are also opting for them. An excerpt:

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.”

The phenomenon is perhaps surprising in a country far more conservative than plastic surgery hotspots such as America, Brazil and South Korea. But there is a good reason why Iranians have a penchant for the alteration. “For ladies who have to cover themselves apart from the face, it is the only thing they can show,” says Mr Shirazi. “A boob job will only get you so far if you have to spend most of the day shrouded in a manteau, the mackintosh-like outer garment almost all Iranian women wear.•