Picking the perfect nose

Nobody can deny its usefulness. We can use it to check out smells, particularly of food, and perhaps for this purpose it is conveniently located just above your mouth. Without its generous support, your glasses would keep falling into your soup, and it also gives you something to scratch or rub in the course of solving a problem.

Size and prominence - or lack of it - are the foremost nose bugbears. Those with big noses wish for smaller ones and people with small noses long for bigger ones. Or maybe the shape is wrong. We live in a world where few people are satisfied with what they have, and more and more are chasing perfection. Cosmetic surgeons become rich by whittling large noses down to small, wide and fleshy into thin and aristocratic.

But do people really become more attractive by changing what nature has given them? In most cases, I think not. A different nose does nothing to change what really needs altering, and that is their mind - or their view of themselves.

By John Kelly, a director of Mentor International.

Visit www.Mentor.ac.