Today we are talking about a trend that has definitely been on the rise in recent years: the tendency to westernise one's appearance. Beauty today has western canons and women of other ethnicities, especially Asian and African women, resort to plastic surgery to have less ethnic features. This phenomenon is becoming a real trend, so much so that in New York - multiracial city par excellence - more and more clinics specialising in plastic surgery on patients of different ethnicities are opening. The phenomenon is however also expanding in Italy, a trend reinforced by the spread of stereotyped images but also driven by the desire on the part of immigrants to conform to the host community, seeking assimilation.

Ethnic cosmetic surgery is mainly requested by people of Asian and African origin. Asians, for instance, have a desire to have more Western eyes, to make their eyes more prominent, and therefore resort to what is called 'ethnic' blepharoplasty.

It may sound strange, as many would like a fuller mouth, but another rather popular procedure is reductive cheiloplasty, i.e. the reduction of lip volume sought by many African women for whom an excessively full mouth is disproportionate to the overall harmony of the face.

The cosmetic surgery most requested by people of African origin, however, concerns the correction of the nose, which is typically flattened and large. The operation required in this case is a reduction rhinoplasty to thin the cartilaginous structures and in particular the wing structures.

With globalisation, therefore, the canons of beauty of the various countries tend to conform to those of the West, with a tendency reinforced by the media that disseminate a stereotypical Western image as an icon of universal beauty. But while the quest for aesthetic improvement is legitimate, requests for treatments aimed at erasing an ethnic trait should always be analysed with great care and sensitivity. There are in fact a whole series of psycho-social implications that cannot be underestimated by the physician. This does not mean that this kind of intervention should always be avoided. There are, for instance, objectively large noses that tend to harden or weigh down the features. What is certainly wrong is to attribute to such an intervention the power to change one's life. Especially when, in getting carried away, one goes so far as to completely distort a person. Like Michael Jackson, it is impossible not to think of him in this case, a black man who managed to completely change his features to white and completely distort his essence.