Maria Meziem made the decision to get rhinoplasty ten months after she moved from Nigeria to the UK. A decision, she tells Black Ballad, spurred from a place of insecurity.

Meziem grew up in Anambra, Nigeria where big noses were the norm. She’d never really noticed hers until she got to a predominantly white country where it seemed her nose was the first thing people noticed about her.

“I had never really noticed my nose before I moved. My old nose was familiar, I saw it everyday in my parents’ faces as well as my friends. But when I got to Birmingham, I became very aware of it,” she says. “My old nose was very Nigerian and I grew to resent that.”

Her surgery didn’t happen immediately, mostly due to the lack of funds. But two years later, she flew to Turkey to get an ethnic rhinoplasty – a procedure she specifically asked for after doing a ton of research online.