Eiffel Tower nose surgery booms in China as students hope it will improve their job prospects

In a strange tribute to France's iconic monument, Chinese graduates are having plastic surgery to make their noses resemble the Eiffel Tower. With millions of young people encountering stiff competition to get on the career ladder that they are turning to plastic surgeons to transform their noses, supposedly into the shape of the Eiffel Tower.

“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 said. He carries out dozens of the operations each month. Students are willing to go under the knife because they are facing a ridiculous amount of competition when starting their careers.

According to the latest figures a record seven million students graduated from college in 2013. This comes as even China’s economy has been slowed down by the global economic crisis. Ads for the surgery are popping up everywhere. On one of the posters you can see a young western woman with light-coloured eyes and a straight nose, a stereotypical beauty, who is pictured with the elegant curves of Paris’s most recognizable monument.
But the €7,200 operation only leaves the patient with a nose that vaguely resembles the contours of the famous landmark. “It’s a classic monument, with an extremely aesthetically pleasing form, and we are trying to combine medicine with art,” an administrative worker in Wang’s practice said. “We hope this nose will become classic and will provoke the same feelings at the Eiffel Tower.”