Joseph Harwood Cosmetic Surgery Video – an honest and informed description of his first time non-surgical nose job, cheek enhancement, lip enhancement and Botox brow lift treatment experience

Transcript

Hi everyone, it’s me Jo and today I’ve been doing, well, I’ve actually been doing a few videos because I’m on my way out tonight. Going to get some mojitos with my friends. But I decided to do a few videos just to get some done because I’ve been so busy. I’ve been moving apartments, I’m getting my keys on Monday if all goes well, trying to find furniture and all that jazz.

But I’ve also taken about a week and a half off just because I’ve been working on my face and I’ve had a little bit done to my face. Which hopefully you guys shouldn’t be able to notice much of a difference that’s my intention when I did it. But it’s life changing for me and I’ll explain why today and I’ll talk about surgery.

So one of the things you guys don’t know about, even though I do talk a lot about the things I don’t like about my face in videos, and therefore I’ve developed techniques to fix them, like glueing my eyelid and contouring my nose straight, and cutting off the corners of my lips so they are very symmetrical. I’m obsessed with symmetry and you guys probably don’t even know this but some of you that are very attentive and very smart bitches will probably know this but I actually flip everything I put online.

All my videos, all the photo shoots I do I get in the back and I’m like, we’re flipping them. You see what I see when I look in the mirror and it’s so dramatically different looking when it’s flipped to me. It’s not even going to look any different to you guys, all of my friends think I’m crazy. But if you drew a line down my face before and flipped it, my face was very very different on each side and everyone’s face is asymmetrical – that’s normality that’s what makes us look unique.

But for me it was so different because when I do my make up it’s specifically for me. It’s almost like carving out a real life version of who I am inside. It sounds weird but that’s how I feel about it. That’s how I use make up to kind of control what I look like and to make me feel happy as well. I think it has something to do with feeling happy in your own skin. So I’ve looked into surgery because the major, I’ll talk to you about the major things now.

I’ve been very insecure about my nose, my nose has always been crooked and I’ve talked about that in a thousand videos. I can fix it in make up and I can fix it to look perfect to me in a reflection, but when you reverse it you can see the indentations. I read from left to right so when I look at a face I’m like one, two, three, four, up, down, up, down. When you see it the other way around, I start of the side and I’m like (gasp), and it doesn’t look like me to me.

And this has become such an issue with me that I don’t take pictures of people that come up to me and that know my work, I don’t do any photo shoots any more with people. I’ve been approached in numerous times in the last three years to do Men’s Wear Week, to do Fashion Week, to do a bridal couture show, I’ve been approached to do a Look Book, I’ve been approached to go to Paris to do a Look Book. I’ve always turned down a lot of these things and I think a lot of photographers are kind of annoyed with me because I have refused so many photo shoots.

It has become a huge issue for me and I’ve looked at so many ways of fixing it and I kind of came to a stand still about it and I was like, I just can’t fix it, this is the way it is always going to be. So I went to so many consultations now I would say over the last six years. I’ve always wanted to get my nose fixed because it’s very crooked I always wanted to see what I could do without blepharoplasty which is when they cut eyelids in so my eyelids would be the same and as I’ve said I’ve done videos about these how I fix them with make up, but make up can only do so much. You wash it off at the end of the night and it didn’t fix it flawlessly enough for me to feel confident not being flipped.

I know it sounds ridiculous, it sounds like I’m just BDD but it’s a real big issue for me because I’m so particular about the way I look and I spend so many hours in front of the mirror my make up specifically the way I want to be. And it’s not just about the way I want to look to you guys, it’s about carving out who I am to myself in this form, that’s how I see it.

So I’ve been to so many consultations now about my nose and I’ve been told that it’s going to require quite a complex procedure because my septum is very deviated at the bottom, my nose is kind of collapsed on the side and it was always kind of slanted like this and you guys probably won’t even see what I’m talking about because I fix it in every video with make up.

But I will show you some pictures on the screen now of what I felt uncomfortable with and you can see from a photo shoot that I did. I was trying to brave it, I was trying to see if I felt good enough to go back to doing more modelling work and I did say ‘yes’ for the first time in about three years to an amazing photographer named Tom who asked me to be a part of his exhibition. So I’ll put those pictures on the screen right now. Now I had an issue because, it’s not just about the contour as well, the contour is good in even light, it’s crap in uneven light – you can see the structure of the nose.

So I hated the way my nose looked I thought it was awful, I went to different surgeons, I’ve contacted different surgeons online and that all pretty much said they would do it, but it would probably make my nose look worse because my nose is strangely very small in width and a lot of surgeons were like ‘Ya, we’ll just do it and we’ll bring your nose closer into your face.’ And I think my nose is absolutely fine from the side. It’s not a small nose by any stretch of the imagination it’s straight and I’ve never had a problem with my profile, it’s never been about the profile, it’s been about the symmetry.

And a lot of, especially male surgeons, have this viewpoint about how noses should look. And to me I think that is where you lose the subtleties, because it’s really not about the structure of the nose, it’s about the shadows and the shapes around it and the symmetry. And I don’t know what it is, but I’ve seen it with a lot of male surgeons – they don’t see the symmetry, they see the structure first. So I went to get a nose job several times now. I’ve either been refused, put out and said I was being silly, my nose is fine. Or I’ve been told that it will be very structural there won’t be any subtle changes because it will make my nose look dramatically different and I wasn’t happy with that, I really wasn’t happy with that.

I wasn’t happy with the fact that my nose would be taken higher on my face because it looks strange. There’s something about the proportions that we see, we understand something about a nose to mouth ratio. A lot of my trans friends have nose jobs and I regret to say I find it really obvious with trans people when they have rhinoplasty because it’s always brought so close to the face, that for the length of the face it looks wrong.

So I was always quite scared of going for rhinoplasty and that’s another reason why I chose to not go the surgical route. So it was always fearful for me, I though, it’s only going to make my nose smaller which won’t help the overall proportion of my face, but it will also be an unnecessary danger to put myself in. I don’t think we should go through the whole anaesthesia thing without really having a valid reason to. I think, to be honest it is a bit of vanity. It’s about vanity before sanity in a lot of cases and I’ve never been that obsessed with the way I look. It’s not so much about that side of it. To me it’s just about creating what I want to see for me. Does that make sense or does this make sense?

So that was the main concern, the nose. Then, because the nose was so asymmetric it made my cheek like my cheek was so close to my face and when I’m leaning this way I had a very gaunt cheek on this side but on this side I was very projected. That was a concern of mine because when you contoured it would show up on this side, but on this side it would like flat and kind of that way.

Then I had a problem with my lips because were that shape and I always used to draw the corner off on this side. That bothered me and of course my eye bothered me because my eyelid was like that on this side and that on this side. You could see it and you couldn’t see it on this side. So those were the issues I had with myself and they weren’t major enough to get surgery and I have gone blepharoplasty consulting too.

So I looked online for about a year and a half now and I’ve tried to look up non-surgical approaches to fix the issues that I’ve had and I knew you could fix the cheek and I knew you could fix mouth with dermal fillers because they just inject and lift up a bit of the muscle, and it’s non-invasive and it doesn’t hurt and it really isn’t a big surgical deal. It doesn’t do damage to your skin, you really can’t have a reaction to it and most of the time it can look very natural.

I kind of came up with this in my head, this kind of concept that I would use face as a kind of a map and we would match up from this side to this side. So I went to see if I could get filler done and I went for a filler consultation and the guy was like ‘No, we can’t do it. I don’t know what you want, I don’t think your nose will be, it will make your nose look podgy, we’d only put a little bit in and then it would disappear.’ So I was really disappointed and I went a couple of weeks ago to a clinic in Brighton and I was very disappointed not to have it done.

Then I found this incredible lady online called Naruschka and she works for a Harley Street clinic called botonics. And I’ll link in the description below her videos because she is incredible and I’ll explain what I’ve had done. So I have had Botox injected around this side of my muscle that pulls the eyebrow down and before you’ll probably remember my eye was like that on the side.

So because that has relaxed the muscle that pulls my eyelid down, it’s lifted the part of my eyelid that’s folded. So now my eyes match. And I’m so excited about that because it means that I will never have to use that horrible glue on my eye again and I didn’t have to change anything with surgery. So I still look like me, I just now look the same on both sides which is my biggest issue I’ve ever had. Neurotoxin actually takes like a week and a half or so to actually start working on the muscle, it needs to go through the muscle and it gradually improves.

I don’t want to get Botox in any form because I can barely move my forehead as it is so I’ve got very little expression, I don’t want any less expression in my forehead and I’ve never had it before so this is my first injection. So it came in a tiny needle and it didn’t hurt. She put lidocaine all over my face first which is a numbing agent and it felt like less painful than plucking an eyebrow. I really couldn’t feel it, I just shut my eye and it was like one, two three and then she pushes there, she pats it kind of in, I guess. But that wasn’t instant but I’ve seen the effects in the last day and a half and it’s been amazing. So that was so easy to do.

Then my nose was next and and she injected the giant hulking gap that I had on this side of my nose, it’s completely up so now it’s smooth and even when I dip my head down it’s smooth. She then injected I think it’s called the columella, this bit which is holding up your septum and I have now a normal columella and it’s lifted my nose straight. I don’t know what she did, I don’t know how she did it because my eyes were shut. But it didn’t hurt so much, it felt more painful than the Botox but still less painful than plucking an eyebrow because it was numb. So this was fine. She injected a little bit on this side as well to narrow the bump distance between the tip and that bit so my nose looks generally straighter.

Now it’s never going to be perfect on this side because the tip’s still a little bit on that side but it’s dead straight on this side, it’s dead straight on this side. My profiles from this point of view and this point of view are now the same and it’s incredible. Oh, I didn’t say as well how long things last. That filler was Perlane and I think because it’s in the nose and you move it less it metabolises slower than other areas, from what I’ve read online. But it should kind of stay completely for about a year and a half but you should get it topped up to be exactly how it is after about eight months to a year I think. So that was really easy I almost cried when I saw my nose after because it was, it made such a huge difference to how I felt about myself and it looked like me, it didn’t look like I had a strange too small Voldemort nose. It didn’t make me look like a funny creature, it didn’t make me look like Jocelyn Wildenstein who I adore but I didn’t have that weird affect, so I was overjoyed.

So then I stupidly asked because I watch these stupid surgery videos all the time, do you use a cannula which is a blunt needle and they pinch a hole in the skin and then they poke this needle in and because it’s blunt it doesn’t cause any trauma in the skin compared to a needle. So she numbed my cheek and she punched the hole in my cheek and I can still feel more on this side than I could on the nose and on the brow and everywhere else it was more painful. So I said to her could you please just make the projection the same on this side as it is on this side.

So she punched the hole in put the cannula in and oh my God I could feel it so much it wasn’t numb at all and as the lidocaine kicked in slowly because they mix a little bit of lidocaine in with the filler, I could feel it like static electricity under the skin and because I could feel it and because I was aware of it for the first time I held my breath. And because I held my breath I got really, really faint and it was very difficult. I had to stop her doing this side and then it was just horrendously painful for me. It was freaky, deaky, weird and freaky, I didn’t like it. But because she jabbed it in and out and everything it was evenly distributed and it didn’t bruise the skin at all which is incredible. It was pretty much instant and it was amazing. So that freaked me out, I sat down for about 10 minutes, got my breath back and a glass of water and she talked me through it, she was very lovely.

Then we had a little bit left over that she said, if she puts a little bit in the nose to mouth on this side, it will bring up the whole ratio right. On this side I don’t have any indentation but on this side because I don’t have any fat there, add a little bit. So she put a tiny fraction just in there to bring it the same so all of this was made to look symmetrical now.

The last bit I had a problem with was my lip on this side, so she injected up and again she used a needle for this so it wasn’t the horrible cannula. This again wasn’t as numb as everything else was and it hurt a little bit more but it was way bearable, it was more bearable than this one and she injected and it just lifted my lip to be the same as this side. So that’s pretty much what I’ve had done, and that was Restylane, it wasn’t Perlane.

I’ve never had any kind of filler before, it was a new experience for me it was more and less painful than I imagined at the same time because I thought the nose was completely the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Epilating hurt more than it. And really the cheeks thing it wasn’t very painful it was just the weirdest sensation I’ve ever felt.

So I can’t really express how happy I am. I went out for the first time because my swelling in my nose went down and it took about three days or so to go down completely. It’ll probably go down a little bit more, I’m probably talking a bit prematurely because I’m so excited. But I’ve been using arnica creams and arnica tablets. You’re meant to take Zinc before to stop bruising as well so I was taking Zinc before.

And it has just made me feel so much more confident, in fact it’s enabled me now to go back and do things that I wasn’t able to do before. A lot of jobs that I’ve been fortunate enough to be asked to do again I’m now going to take so I’m super happy. I still look like me, hopefully you don’t see a dramatic difference because I certainly don’t. So that’s really my surgery blog and it wasn’t really surgery it was a non-surgical operation and I think if you guys are looking into getting something but you’re too scared to go the surgical route or you really don’t think it will help you.

They can do so much now that they’ve never been able to do before and for me this has really revolutionised the way I feel about myself and it was so easy. I’m really shocked by it, I’m really shocked by it. It’s just made me feel so much more confident and happy about the way I look. And I don’t know if you guys even think about that about me. I think you guys think that I’m this strange, kind of like ethereal creature that is perfectly confident but I’ve been really insecure about it and it’s just been something that’s really changed the way I see myself.

So everyone seems to love it so far, I hope it stays like this and I will keep you updated if I do get anything else done, which I don’t really think I will but maybe, we’ll see. I’ve got my two week check up to come next so I’ll give you some more updates when I get some more information because I think it’s really fascinating learning about this stuff.

But I’ll put all the links of botonics in below because I do think she’s a genius and she really did make me feel so much better about the way I looked. So check out her videos as well on here and definitely look into it if you’re considering getting rhinoplasty but you think maybe it would be a little bit too much for your face maybe, like I did.

All right guys, well I really hope you liked that blog, I hope it was educational and interesting, I feel a little bit hungover today because I went out last night so I’m really not as enthusiastic as normal it was kind of fun to talk about it and to show off my new face which is my old face just made symmetrical. All right guys, well thank you so much. Please subscribe to me and if not check out my other videos.

Thanks guys.

To discuss if a non-surgical nose job, cheek enhancement, lip enhancement or Botox treatment might be suitable for you, kindly contact us and we will be delighted to organise a free consultation for you.

By: Naruschka Henriques

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