By Diana Alghoul
A hypnotherapist’s honest reflection on rhinoplasty, self-concept, and the life that bloomed on the other side.
Let me be clear from the start: I’m not here to tell you whether you should or shouldn’t get a nose job. That’s a conversation between you, your body, and your own inner knowing. What I am here to do is tell you what happened to me, because as I approach six years since my rhinoplasty, I’ve been sitting with just how profoundly my life has shifted. And I don’t just mean my reflection in the mirror.
I used to watch a lot of before-and-after vlogs on YouTube. What I never saw, and what I’ve come to understand deeply as a hypnotherapist, is an honest exploration of what happens to your self-concept, your karma, and your actual life when you make a change like this. So here’s mine.
The nose I was trying so hard to love
My relationship with my nose was, honestly, a little funny in hindsight. I went through full cycles of love and loathing. I remember the first time I met my surgeon, for something completely unrelated to my nose, and I told him, with total conviction: “I would never change my nose. It’s my trademark Palestinian feature.”
And I meant it. Or at least, I thought I did. What was really happening was that I was forcing acceptance onto something I had made peace with, but knew couldn't come with me in the next stage of my life (which, to be fair, I had no idea was even happening), and in doing so, I was also suppressing a version of myself that I’d never really given permission to exist.
In Mizaj Tibbi, the Arabic-Islamic tradition of temperament medicine, think of it as the Middle Eastern counterpart to Ayurveda, I had long believed my constitution was predominantly earth. Melancholic. Intellectual. Grounded to the point of heaviness. When I finally had my constitution properly assessed, I found out I’m actually air and water: free-spirited, highly intuitive, deeply empathetic. The kind of person who moves through the world like a feeling rather than a fact. Reality check, indeed.
Coincidentally, I got this checked a year after getting my nose done when I let go of the identity of the disturbed intellect, but I wasn't really sure where else I was going. My friend took me to a three-day immersive on Mizaj Tibbi, and I was the only one who couldn't figure out what I was. The instructor, with one look, said 'you're air', which was the complete opposite of the bookish, earthy person I grew up as. I always wonder what he would have said had I gone a year or two before. As we know, your karmic path consistently changes, and we can quantum leap to different realities within seconds. I know I wasn't always a Sanguine/Air.
Divine timing, Reiki, and a deviated septum
The pull towards surgery came in a strange and synchronistic window, which was between the first and second UK lockdowns, around the same time I was being attuned to Reiki. I’d been practising nadi shodhana (alternate nostril breathing) and kept noticing how restricted one side was. I went to see my surgeon privately because the NHS waiting list felt impossibly long, and what I found out stopped me in my tracks: I had a deviated septum and a healed fracture on my nose. This is why you need to choose the perfect surgeon who specialises in ENT, as well as being a surgeon who can change your life.
The nose I had been working so hard to accept? It wasn’t even my original nose. There had been a fracture at some point, one I’d forgotten about (I think it happened when I was around 15, when I was playing rugby), and the nose I’d been living with, the one I’d been trying to love as a symbol of my heritage, had already been altered by life itself. That irony still makes me smile.
Getting time off work was easy. I was a journalist who was working from home full-time because of the lockdowns, and all I needed was a week off to recover before I could start working again, since there was no commute.
At that point, I wanted to study Reiki and found a teacher who told me that my time would be August 2020. When I realised my surgery date could be around then, I told my Reiki master I wanted to postpone my attunement until after the surgery because I did not want to risk getting the date set and having to change it if I had to go into quarantine. She told me to trust in Divine timing, set the Reiki attunement date and know it will all work out perfectly. I did just that, and I received my Reiki attunement a few days before I was given a surgery date and called into quarantine, which was when two weeks of pre-surgery isolation were required. The sequence of it all felt like something being choreographed from somewhere beyond my planning mind.
Funnily enough, a few months before all of this started to materialise, I met someone who would become my hypnotherapy teacher, and I had some amazing sessions with her that took me deep into my subconscious mind. Two months before booking my surgery, I met my Higher Self for the first time in hypnosis, and I remember noting her features looked like mine, but they didn't. Not better, not worse, just different.
All of this assured me that my pull to have surgery came from a healthy place of coming to self, as opposed to the unhealed mindset of wanting to change something that I perceived to be ugly.
The surgeon who wouldn’t do fake
My surgeon, Ali Taghi, is an ENT Consultant, which made him the perfect person for something that was as much a medical procedure as it was an aesthetic one. He understood the structural issues, and he was exacting in his precision. When I showed up with a Pinterest board full of nose references, he shut it down immediately: “I don’t do fake.”
And yet, he gave me exactly what I wanted. When I mention the surgery now, and I’m not remotely ashamed of it, people are consistently shocked. It looks natural. The scarring is virtually invisible. It looks like me, just... the me that was underneath all along. Just like the face of my Higher Self that I saw in hypnosis...
...unlike the Pinterest board I wasn't allowed to discuss. Eep. God has a funny way of humbling you in a way that connects you directly to Him. Embrace the trippy, my loves, because coincidences don't exist.
Mini disclaimer: these discussions on spirituality and the higher self were not present in any consultation; they're just part of my journey.
The outside-in shift: What face reading taught me
In Traditional Chinese Medicine and various schools of physiognomy, the ancient art of face reading, the nose is considered the seat of your direction in life. When I was studying face yoga, my teacher asked me whether I’d noticed shifts in my life following my rhinoplasty. My answer was immediate and unequivocal: yes.
This procedure changed me from the outside in. As the months passed, opportunity after opportunity arrived to shed the old identity I’d been carrying, the melancholy, the hiding, the need to signal depth and intellect through an understated exterior. That version of me had never been the real one anyway. I’d been performing a heaviness that wasn’t mine.
Now, I occasionally encounter people who underestimate me because of the way I look. Someone who leans into her femininity and her fun must not be serious, right? That assumption is theirs to carry, not mine to correct. If anything, it’s a beautiful filter.
Six Years of Life, Restructured
Here’s the shape of what unfolded:
- 2020: Reiki attunement and rhinoplasty in the same few weeks. I began taking my spirituality seriously for the first time. This was also when I started to understand feminine intuition and tentatively began listening to mine.
- 2021: I realised journalism was costing me more than it was giving back. I moved into Marketing, Communications and PR while quietly exploring other healing modalities and allowing myself, for the first time, to dream about building a practice.
- 2022: A karmic year. I turned 30 and was brought face-to-face with every belief I’d ever held about being undervalued, overworked, and tying my entire worth to my output. My work had been my whole identity in my twenties. That had to change.
- 2023: The year my nervous system started to set new boundaries for my future, and so did I. It meant getting comfortable with saying no and being grounded when people would try to push back.
- 2024: I studied hypnotherapy from the same teacher who showed me the depth of the subconscious mind, and I became a Reiki Master and started to integrate my Islamic faith and my Palestinian healing roots into my practice, essentially creating my own healing path with everything I know.
- 2025: I left full-time employment, launched my practice, and kept one foot in Comms on a part-time and freelance basis, because I genuinely love that work when it’s on my terms.
- 2026: I integrated all of it. I show up on LinkedIn unapologetically mystical, proudly pink, and absolutely certain of what I know and what I’m here to offer. I've helped so many women with their healing journeys, but I've also started my own freelance consulting on MY terms which has helped people sell out, design their products differently and understand their target market from a perspective that is informed by energy and the subconscious mind (you'd be surprised how many people accidentally repel their ideal clients because they have blocks when dealing with them).
Alongside some other radical changes in my personal life, which isn't for a public blog... 😉
With love and zero regrets
The shift began before surgery. I want to be honest about that. But the surgery was what pulled the trigger on everything that followed. It was the physical act of choosing myself, of saying, out loud, with money and recovery time and vulnerability, that I wanted to inhabit my life more fully.
I had spent years doing the inner work: building self-worth, developing acceptance, and learning to make decisions from love rather than fear. By the time I went into that operating theatre, I wasn’t trying to fix something broken. I was leaning into something true.
The beautiful irony is that the nose I’d been working so hard to accept wasn’t even the nose I was born with. I had been performing loyalty to a feature that had already been changed by a fracture I’d forgotten, while living, in so many other ways, a life that also wasn’t quite mine. The surgery and the truth arrived at the same time.
I look back at my old nose, and I actually see a lot of beauty. I was edgy, sharp, and deep in a dark feminine energy with my signature black eyeliner, dark clothes, thick glasses and a smile saved for exclusive moments and people. She was only 21 when she was the youngest person in her War Studies MA (at one of the world's top War institutions) who looked her dissertation supervisor dead in the eye, disagreed with everything he said and stood for, and still passed her dissertation despite his attempts to undercut her grade. She then became a fearless journalist who refused to sell out her land or her people for money and opportunities, and proudly platformed, protested, and spoke up to authority despite repeated warnings not to. I love who I was and I love the decisions she made to make me who I am now. Alhamdulillah a thousand times over.
Take these decisions seriously. Come to them from fullness. And for the love of everything sacred, please research your surgeon.