Kate Middleton's nose: Latest plastic surgery inspiration

What’s in a nose? That which we call a nose on any other face would be able to smell as sweet and yet women are paying through the nose to have theirs altered to look like the one on the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton.

In the land of William Shakespeare the number of women getting nose jobs in order to look like Middleton has tripled since 2011, according to Plastic surgeon Maurizio Persico in the Daily Mail.

It’s not as if women haven’t spent decades shouting “in your face!” at Mother nature as they reach for the phone to ring-up a rhinoplasty. However,  plastic surgeons are getting more and more requests from women who want to replace their own look with that of a celebrity.

I begin to wonder if face patents can’t be far off. If it were my nose I’m not sure I’d want to see it walking around on someone else, much less thousands of others. Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships, but Middleton appears to be ahead of her by a prow or two.

In 2010, Kim Kardashian reached out to a Twitter follower, asking her not to undergo plastic surgery to try to look like her. "Don't try 2 b someone else," she tweeted. Adding she shouldn’t "change yourself for anybody but yourself."

This is somewhere just North of the usual body image issues which drive people to the knife, Botulism toxin injections, and unhealthy weight-loss schemes. This is in the realm of shedding one’s own face in pursuit of a dream becoming more commonly held that if beauty is good, celebrity beauty is better.

As British Actress Jane Seymore once pointed out, “I find it interesting that 16-year-olds are having plastic surgery. People in their 40s used to think, 'I'm aging, I have to do something about it.' Now children are deciding they don't like the way they look.”

Dr. Tony Youn, a plastic surgeon in Troy, Michigan, told CNN, "It's a red flag. This person has psychological problems and is not a good candidate for any kind of plastic surgery. Plastic surgery is meant to make you look like a better, younger version of yourself, not to look like somebody else."

Wanting to look like someone famous isn’t new, in fact MTV ran an entire reality series called “I Want a Famous Face” which followed the transformations of 12 young people who chose to use plastic surgery to look exactly like their celebrity idols such as Pamela Anderson and Janet Jackson. It was a cautionary tale full of risk and woe.

Then of course there is the young Ukrainian who has girls begging for contact lenses that make their pupils larger so they can be Barbie using the non-surgical tactics of Valeria Lukyanova, a teen who became an Internet sensation earlier this year. The lacquered look is all over teens and young women who want to be someone they view as perfection personified.

In the case of grown women making these choices the key word is choice, but when teens begin to fixate on the Barbie or Anime-alike videos, makeup, and contact lenses it may be time to seek help for a burgeoning emotional issue that is unlikely to be solved from the outside in.

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Pop Star Pink’s song “Perfect” seems to have fallen on deaf ears when she crooned: "Pretty, pretty please, don't you ever, ever feel/Like you're less than, less than perfect/Pretty, pretty please, if you ever, ever feel/Like you're nothing you are perfect to me."

Maybe we need to start singing new nursery songs, a reprise of vintage Billy Joel’s, “I love you just the way you are.” We need to get something stuck in our heads, other than someone else’s features.