In this post, leaving aside all the other gossip about Michael Jackson, I wanted to gather all of the relevant photos and take a closer look specifically at the history of Michael Jackson’s nose. Of course the exact details are unknowable but let’s see what we can guess.
This above photo is a good before and after summary.
In the Beginning
First, let’s have a look at the young Michael.
Here we have MJ in the year 1979. In 1979 Jackson apparently broke his nose during a dance routine and this is what caused him to have his first rhinoplasty operation. Some believe this was only an excuse. The surgery was not very successful because he complained that it was difficult to breathe and it affected his dance performances. Next, he became acquainted with a Dr. Steven Hoefflin, a well-known celebrity plastic surgeon, who performed his second rhinoplasty and other subsequent operations.
This might be the last of the untouched Michael or had he already started?
And in 1983 Boom! we see the dent on the right side of his nose and the drastically thinner, sculpted shape.
Here on the cover of the 1983 Pretty Young Thing but possibly before the precious photo, the dent is visible but his nose does not appear too refined.
Here we have the most "perfect" nose in the thriller era. The nose is straight and not overly pinched with no dent visible although it is a little thin and narrow. It is arguably too thin and narrow for his face already. These were still the early days of plastic surgery and the fatal mistake may have been to go too far too fast, making such a big change to the nose in a pioneering field. After the first one or two failed drastic operations there may have been little the doctors could do to restore the nose. Perhaps MJ was just never satisfied with the look or his ability to breath through his new noses.
Here in 1984 you can see a big dent on the left side and it looks like part of the bridge has been removed.
In this 1988 it looks like the point of the nose has been rolled-up and back a little and the nostrils have more of a sharp M shape.
Disaster Strikes
At this point in the early 90s clearly something went drastically wrong and MJ was only seen in public with designer surgery masks. Complicating the matter is that MJ himself gave obviously untrue information about himself and the operations. He said in 1993 that he had only had two cosmetic operations, one on his nose and another on his chin. This he claimed was for medical reasons. His extreme physical transformation and testimony from his doctors clearly show that he had more than that done.
One of the many doctors, a Mr. Arnold Klein, has claimed the MJ had to have his nose recreated after extensive plastic surgery left him unable to breathe properly. This might clearly be the case as someone who once had normal nostrils then had the size of the nostrils reduced to about one third of the size of a drinking straw might have some difficultly breathing through the greatly reduced passages. Dr Klein said he had make the case to stop Jackson from continuing surgery and then began remake his nose and cheeks using fillers. It wasn’t so bad a nose said Klein, it just got to an extreme point where it was just to thin and that the passages were just not sufficient for him to breath through and the cartilage of the nose was completely gone.
Here from the side you can see one of the incarnations of his nose as the shape of the bridge curves upward.
At some point, presumably due to the loss of cartilage and problems with skin grafts and blood circulation MJ began using a prosthetic nose.
This photo shows some flesh colored tape covering the hole where his nose was. After his death, London’s Daily Mail quotes a witness in the morgue saying Jackson had no nose at all left but only a tiny hole. His plastic nose was not attached or visible anywhere nearby.
In this image we see what MJ might have looked like had he never had the surgeries.
