Claudia Doumit likes her nose, but that wasn’t always the case. For a long time, she had many people in her ear telling her about her nose, giving her unwanted takes on what it should look like should she make it big.
The actor, known for The Boys, recently opened up about how Hollywood pressured her to get plastic surgery. She eventually dismissed the idea, but explained how it took time and effort to get past it.
While at 2024 Comic-Con International, Doumit said that she was encouraged to get a nose job when trying to book a leading gig or the pretty ingénue role. “That was fed to me for many, many years,” she said.
When she was younger, Doumit had planned on getting work done to her face. But after she got her first break, and second job, and one after that, she didn’t get surgery. “I kept booking jobs and not getting nose jobs,” she said. Taking a step back, she saw that the pressure she received from others wasn’t reflective of the truth.
“I kind of realized one day that I was booking jobs with the way that I looked,” she said to a clapping audience. The idealization for a smaller nose is likely part of a larger narrative regarding Hollywood’s push towards Western beauty standards, which often reflect racist and sexist norms.
Doumit is proud of her features, brushing off the agents’ feedback and proving their comments to be outdated. “It’s a beautiful half-Lebanese, half-Italian nose. It’s very strong,” she said, adding that she wants to see “more big noses on women on the screen. So go, baby.”
Whether anyone chooses to get work done to their face is a personal choice, though Hollywood still takes free liberties to judge, especially when it comes to women. In fact, Doumit’s The Boys co-star Erin Moriarty had briefly quit social media due to comments about her potentially getting work done.
After conservative media personality Megyn Kelly alleged Moriarty got plastic surgery, the actor said the claim was “disgustingly false” and expressed her disappointment surrounding the discourse about her face. “It’s broken my heart. You’ve broken my heart. You’ve lost the privilege of this account,” Moriarty said.
It’s a damned-if-you-do or damned-if-you-don’t type of situation regarding plastic surgery, but recently some of the taboo regarding procedures has appeared to wane to some degree.
In Doumit’s words, it’s quite simple. “I’m doing the thing I love, and I’m doing it the way I look,” she said. “And it’s not what the traditional narrative is. It’s not what might be what a lot of people think beauty is, but I think it’s beautiful.”