Nasal Trauma

"Still, could be worse. My nose could be gushing blood!"

— The Penguin, Batman Returns

When it comes to attacks on the human face, the nose is one of the biggest targets after the eyes and the mouth: after all, it's the first element of the face that's within reach. Though it doesn't have quite the same visceral response as attacking the eyes or the teeth, it's a very obvious vulnerability with its own special brand of pain and visual flair attached.

Hitting someone in the ear, for example, is painful but not quite as visually distinctive; in fiction, breaking someone's nose is not only noticeable thanks to the spectacular nosebleed, but it's often considered a sign that the attacker has done some serious damage. As anyone who's ever experienced this in real life knows, a broken nose is a big deal: the pain is immediate, the impact is disorienting, breathing may be impeded, the blood flow is often quite dramatic, and the nose itself may end up a different shape altogether if not properly treated. With this in mind, it's no surprise that bloody or broken noses are the most recognizable facial injury in fistfights, a visual shorthand for "you've just been hit hard."

When it comes to more serious injuries, there's a reason why characters with no noses appear unusual in live-action works: the nose plays a very important role in the human perception of the face, and without it, the entire face looks wrong... and that's not even getting into the horror of having the nose reduced to a gaping hole, for example. As such, going for the nose is one of the most common tactics in facial mutilation as a means of leaving the victim noticeably scarred for life.

Long story short, this trope deals with attacks on the nose of any kind. If they cause pain, they're here.

• Someone's nose being grabbed, twisted, or used to drag someone around by.
• Someone's nose being bashed or broken.
• Someone's nose being bitten.
• Someone's nose being cut — or sliced clean off.
• Someone's nose being shot off.
• Someone's nose having something sharp or generally uncomfortable jammed into it.
• Someone's nose being eroded away.
• Someone's nose exploding.
• Someone's nose comedically throbbing.

Depending on the severity of the attack, this can result in the character becoming The Noseless. In a written work, the character may subsequently talk in Congestion Speak.

Extreme cases may involve Facial Horror or Cold-Blooded Torture of some kind.

Compare Agony of the Feet, Ear Ache, Fingore, and Tongue Trauma for other injuries to specific body parts.

Compare Psychic Nosebleed. Contrast Nasal Weapon.

Examples:

Advertising

• One ad for Little Caesar's Pizza has a Roman family dressed in togas and wearing laurel wreaths on their heads enter a limo while throngs cheer. As Papa Caesar waves through the vehicle's open window, the pane motors up, pinching his prominent nose against the top.
• The Ultra Series infomercials series, Ultraman Nice, has the Ultra battling Tabu Zagon, whose Attack Reflector abilities can No-Sell all of Nice's attacks. Nice got around the issue by firing energy disks into Tabu's nostrils, which is enough to defeat it.

Anime & Manga

• Tomeya Akai in Captain Tsubasa suffers (among other injuries) a nasal fracture as a result of one of Stefan Levin's shots in the Japan vs. Sweden match.
• A Certain Magical Index: During their fight, Touma Kamijou rips Shiage Hamazura's nose ring out and then punches him in the nose, causing it to gush blood.
• In Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto, 16-year-old Cesare Borgia brings a cape to a knife fight and wins. How? Well, he rolls the cape into a rope, and besides choking his opponent, Barbaric Bully Henri with it, he catches Henri's feet in it and pulls, causing Henri's face to crash into the ground and mess up his nose quite brutally. And it wasn't even his cape — he'd just plucked it off the shoulders of his hapless rival Giovanni de'Medici. When he gives it back, Giovanni sees the blood on it and faints.
• Referred to in Genzo, where it's mentioned that during the Korean invasion Hideyoshi ordered his men to show their valor by bringing back the cut off noses of their victims.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency, Joseph Joestar punches a corrupt cop in the face and calls him a "Stupid Pig". For added fun, the cop's finger was still up his nose when it happened.
• In the opening chapters of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Josuke first reveals the power of Crazy Diamond by breaking a delinquent's nose and using his healing power to rearrange its structure into a pig-like snout.
• In My Hero Academia, Hero Killer Stain is missing a nose. My Hero Academia: Vigilantes reveals that he cut it off himself, though not before having it completely wrecked beyond repair by Knuckleduster.
• One Piece:
  • Usopp's Tengu-like nose is often victim of this trope, either when he's grabbed by it and dragged around or when he gets a 4-ton baseball bat in the face, leaving his nose bendy and bloody.
  • When Arlong bites into Luffy during their fight, Luffy grabs his long, barbed nose and snaps it like a twig to get him off.
• Rurouni Kenshin: When Battousai first emerges when fighting Jin'ei Udo, the first thing Kenshin does is to suddenly smash him across the face with his blunt Reverse Blade, bending his nose in half. Jin'ei yells in pain, before complimenting his opponent and putting the nose back in shape with an audible "crock" sound.
• Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs: Alpha Bitch Stephanie Fou Offrey decides to drive a wedge between Olivia and Angelica out of spite for the former. Angelica gets pissed at this and punches her in the face, breaking her nose. And even then Stephanie doesn't learn her lesson.

Comic Books

• Batman: Black and White: In "Broken Nose", Batman's opponent is a bank robber in a suit of powered armor. During their first fight, Batman gets his nose broken by a blow from a powered and armored fist. After winning their second fight and hauling the robber out of the armor, Batman makes a point of returning the favor.
• The Boys: Payback member Soldier Boy has his nose bitten off by Butcher in the the 32nd issue. While able to hold onto his severed nose, Soldier Boy ends up losing it in the next issue when it is eaten by Butcher's dog Terror.
• Femforce villain 'No-Nose' Nanette was an underworld moll had her nose bitten off by her then-boyfriend the supervillain Rip-Jaw, resulting in her becoming The Noseless.
• The Flashpoint (DC Comics) miniseries The Legion of Doom has Animal Man get his nose bitten off by Heatwave.
• Pictured above in Injustice: Gods Among Us, Alfred Pennyworth takes a drug that temporarily makes him as strong as Superman and then proceeds to give the Man of Steel a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown starting with headbutting his nose to protect Batman.
• Crops up in The Magicians: Alice's Story; as with the original novel, Emily Greenstreet accidentally disfigures herself in her attempts to magically pretty herself up for the teacher she's trying to romance - except this time, the originally-ambiguous results are actually seen in frame. Among other things, Emily's nose has been eroded away.
• Jesse Custer, ever the Combat Pragmatist, inflicts this on an opponent early in Preacher. Not only does he ram his fingers up the guy's nose, but rips them out through the sides, practically shredding the damn thing.
• A Running Gag in Princeless – Raven: The Pirate Princess is Raven getting her nose broken. It happens in the very first issue, and she suffers two more fractures in about as many weeks.
• So extremely prevalent in the works of "German father of comics" Wilhelm Busch that one begins to speculate about a Freudian issue.
• There is a Running Gag in Red Robin where Tim Drake's new ally, Prudence continuously gets her nose broken by various characters.

Fan Works

• Anger Management: During the first fight, Lincoln punches Lynn in the nose, giving her a nosebleed.
• The Boy Who Cried Idiot: Martin bites Clyde on the nose hard enough to make him cry.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Multiple occasions from different causes:
  • Ami's corrupted Shabon Spray has some very nasty effects on sensory organs:
    the dark magic performed the same task of blinding and disorienting the targets that Mercury's usual chilly fog would have. [...] she saw monsters claw at their eyes in the darkness. Blood was flowing from their ears and noses.
  • From A Meddler Appears, a rat gets a bloody nose due to sniffing something from that came from a room with concentrated bile demon stench:
    Ami dropped the loot unceremoniously in her own treasure chamber, where it landed on the ground with a soft thud. A rat scuttled out of the shadows and approached cautiously, twitching its nose as it sniffed the new box. Moments later, it let out an offended squeak and bounded away, bleeding from its nostrils. Bile demons, the young Keeper shuddered. A locked room would concentrate the smell...
• Jaune Arc, Lord of Hunger: Ruby's nose gets broken when Nihilus throws her using the Force, near the fic's end.
• Lincoln Gets Limber begins with the Loud Parents wanting Lincoln to take up a sport to keep himself active, so he tries out several sports offered at school to find one that he would like. Lincoln's attempt at trying racquetball ended with him getting a bloody nose from a stray ball.
• The Pirate's Soldier: In Chapter 22, after Heero is introduced by the Jurai royal family as the new legitimate heir to the throne, Seiryo Tennan immediately steps up and challeges him to a honor duel. They agree to victory by first blood or surrender, so Heero wins by headbutting him in the nose, breaking it.

Film — Animation

• A pink bunny in Cool World is playing craps with the Quirky Miniboss Squad. The bunny needs a four and rolls a pair of twos. Slash, however, plucks one pip off each die, then declares, "Aw, s-s-s-snake eyes. You lose." When the bunny protests this blatant cheat, Slash inserts one long finger blade into the bunny's nostril, wrenching his nose out of shape, and demands payment.
• After losing her temper with the title character in Coraline, the Other Mother grabs her by the nose and drags her out of the room. For good measure, the Other Mother is in her true form and sporting extremely long, sharp fingers.
• Late in Corpse Bride, the male chef - decomposing like everyone else in the underworld - ends up losing his nose when one of his fellow chefs accidentally whacks him in the back of the head. Said nose lands in the cauldron they were cooking with... and ends up becoming the key ingredient of the wedding cake.
• In Encanto, Isabela twice accidentally beans Mariano in the nose with a vine via Power Incontinence.
• In The Jungle Book (1967), Baloo asks Mowgli to flick a fly off his nose. The monkey who'd taken Mowgli's place hits him on the nose.
• The Bowler Hat Guy from Meet the Robinsons seeks to enter the orphanage covertly through an open window. But first, he glances furtively around to ascertain the coast is clear, his long nose resting on the windowsill as he does so. Played for Laughs when the window suddenly falls, pinching his nose against the sill as the rest of him leaps in pain.
• In Steven Universe: The Movie, Steven's nose bleeds after he gets punched in the face. Notably, this is one of the only times in the series where blood is actually shown after an injury.
• Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats: When Ratsputin the dog is watching the gang through a set of holes in Amy Vandergelt's portrait, his nose also causes the portrait to bulge out. Unfortunately for him, T.C. sees this and unknowingly smacks him in the schnoz while flattening it out.
• In Turning Red, Abby punches Mei in the nose after Mei asks her to hit her pointing toward her arm.

Film — Live-Action

• Anazapta. The manservant Randall Bacon wears a patch over the hole in his face where his nose was cut off in punishment, as revealed in a flashback scene. The man who did this suffers some Laser-Guided Karma when his nose starts gushing blood after the antagonist apparently gave him the evil eye.
• The Penguin inflicts this on one of his campaign staff in Batman Returns, taking a massive bite out of his nose and sending blood gushing all over the place.
• Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance): During Riggan's opening night show, he loads the prop gun with real bullets, intending to commit suicide onstage. Instead he ends up shooting his nose off and fainting, waking up to find he's still alive, his play is getting incredible reviews for "super realism", and he's been surgically given a new nose.
• Appears quite famously in Chinatown when Jake Gittes is warned not to continue his investigation by a knife-wielding thug (played by the director in a cameo) who ends up slicing one of his nostrils open. As such, Gittes spends the rest of the film with his nose bandaged.
• In A Clockwork Orange, Alex ends up earning a full milk bottle to the face courtesy of his long-abused fellow gang-members, leaving him with a nasty cut across his nose. After Alex gets arrested, a police interrogator jams his thumb into the bandaged wound.
• At the beginning of Con Air, Poe strikes a drunk guy who was molesting his wife hard enough in the nose to kill the man, resulting in Poe being sentenced to ten years in prison and his involvement with the plot of the movie.
• Freddy vs. Jason: During Kia's first nightmare, she dreams that Freddy sticks one of his finger blades up her nostril and rips her nose off.
• During the prison sequence in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Groot rescues Quill from a fellow prisoner by jamming his root-fingers up the guy's nostrils and hoisting him into the air, complete with nasty sound effects. The aftereffects leave the prisoner slumped on the floor in a sobbing heap, hands clasped over his nose.
• As with the book, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry is caught spying on Malfoy and gets his nose kicked in for his trouble. However, the film adds an extra layer of this when Luna Lovegood has to pop his nose back into place with magic, resulting in a loud cracking sound and a yelp of pain from Harry — bit of a change from the original novel in which Tonks' Episkey spell was completely painless.
• Both Harry and Marv in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York get their noses squished in one scene, then they both proceed to pull them back out into place.
• Inspector Gadget (1999): Claw pinches Kramer's nose in the first and McKible's nose in the second. Both instances are Played for Laughs.
• Occurs courtesy of Pistol-Whipping in ''Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," resulting in a lot of blood and pained expletives.
  Gay Perry: You think that's funny, huh? I'm gonna break your nose now. [thump]
• A fistfight between the Kray twins in Legend (2015), results in Ron Kray getting his nose broken with a Sickening "Crunch!". Ron immediately staggers away, covered in blood and screaming at the top of his lungs, and needs to steal a stiff drink from one of the club patrons before he can calm down... and then start fighting all over again.
• In the opening scene of The Phantom (1996), the titular character rams Breen headfirst into a tree, breaking the latter's nose in the process.
• Seerlena tortures Scrad and Charlie for information in Men in Black II by threading her tendrils into their noses - in one nostril and out the other, from one head to the next. In an amusing twist, this doesn't just cause them significant pain, but it actually makes them speak in Helium Speech.
• In Pan's Labyrinth, Captain Vidal bashes a suspected rebel's nose in with the base of a wine bottle, complete with some charming shots of the poor bastard's nose crumpling inwards under the onslaught.
• In Pure Country, country music superstar Dusty gets in a drunken brawl with a man who's harassing the woman he's flirting with. The fight goes about how you'd expect a fight to go when both parties are drunk, and the man is accidentally hit in the nose by the lady's truck door as she tries to leave. The man shows up at her house the next day and gets into another brief fight with Dusty. It's a Curb-Stomp Battle as Dusty's first punch lands on his broken nose.
• In Raging Bull, Jake LaMotta's wife absently mentions that his next opponent, Tony Janiro, has a pretty face... and the Bronx Bull takes it personally: when they meet in the ring, Jake goes straight for Janiro's face and doesn't stop until he's satisfied. Close-up shots show the poor bastard's nose being squished flat with a loud wet crunch, gushing blood everywhere.
  Jake: He ain't pretty no more.
• Raising the Wind: As Mervyn gives condescending advice to a group of street musicians, the tallest one orders their leader to "punch him on the hooter".
• The "Pride" murder in Se7en features a beautiful supermodel having her nose cut off "to spite her face," as Detective Somerset puts it; she is then given a choice between calling for an ambulance or committing suicide with a bottle of pills. The victim picks the latter.
• In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne attempts to fend off the Sisters during an attempted Prison Rape in the projection room of the prison cinema, breaking Rooster MacBride's nose with a heavy film reel. Unfortunately, the Sisters take this personally...
• Jack's affair in Sideways goes horribly wrong when his romantic partner discovers that he's actually due to be married soon. Enraged, she smashes him in the face with her motorcycle helmet, breaking his nose. Jack spends the rest of the film wearing a nasal splint and has to crash Miles' car into a tree to make it look as if they've been in an accident, just so his injuries don't raise unwanted questions when the wedding finally rolls around.
• Tetris (2023): Robert Maxwell gains a well-deserved one, when he attempts to physically attack Belikov, after the latter signs over the Tetris console and handheld rights to Nintendo.
• Total Recall (1990): Quaid has to ram a self-guiding pincer up his nose in order to extract the bug implanted in his head. This is nasty enough on its own, but the bug is clearly bigger than his nostrils, so we get to see his nose grotesquely deforming out of shape as he slowly removes it.
• True Romance features Clifford's torture beginning with Vincent Coccotti punching him hard in the nose, leaving Clifford with a hankie clamped over his bloody schnoz for the remainder of the scene. This is the nicest thing the Mafia have in store for him hence why Clifford provokes Coccotti into killing him.

Literature

• Angela Nicely: In “Pony Party!”, Dobbin the horse only runs in his course because he got bit on the nose by a horsefly.
• In Badjelly The Witch, Mud Wiggle punches a shark on the nose and he has to go to the "sharks' nose hospital".
• In Blood Trust, Alli disables a guard by shoving her fingers up his nostrils hard enough to shatter the cartilage in his nose.
• Early in The Cockroach War, main character Toby takes part in a friendly game of football against Beverly Cadwallader; during Bev's charge towards the goal, he tries to tackle her - only to end up getting one of her breasts square in the nose. As Toby narrates, this doesn't sound painful, but Beverly is a lot older and bigger than him and wearing a stiff bra too: the narration compares it to being smashed in the snout with "a melon stuffed with wet cement." Toby goes down hard, leading to this immortal line from his dad: "Watch out for those bosoms, Toby, they're lethal!"
• At the end of the Afortunado sequence in Colony, community planner Charles Perry Gordon tries to fake a mugging with the help of two thugs for hire, not knowing they're actually debt collectors out to get him. Having been told to close his eyes and wait for a supposedly superficial beating, Gordon opens them just in time for a knuckle-dustered fist to hit him so hard that his nose explodes!
• The Famous Five: In Five Run Away Together, Julian is determined to teach Edgar a lesson after he has been nasty to George, and seizes Edgar's nose.
  Edgar: Led go! Led go! You're hurding me! Let go by dose!
• Wash gets clubbed in the face with a rifle by one of the villains and is left with a broken nose in Firefly Generations. He notes it’s been broken before too.
• Ghost Girl (2021): Zee kicks Nellie in the nose after the latter insults her family, bloodying it.
• Graceling Realm: Katsa recounts the story of how she discovered her Killing Grace: she panicked as a child when an older, royal man seemed to be taking interest in her... and proceeded to smash his nose into his face so hard it killed him. She was just a child at the time.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire mentions that a Hogwarts student named Eloise Midgen tried to curse her acne off her face. Exactly how this went isn't revealed, but she apparently ended up having to have her nose reattached (and it was permanently off-center as a result). Incidentally, that same book also introduces Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody, who's missing a big chunk of his nose (on top of his whole face being Covered in Scars and one eye being replaced with a magical prosthesis).
  • One of the first physical characteristics mentioned about Dumbledore is that his nose is long and crooked, as if it had been broken at least twice. Deathly Hallows strongly implies that at least one of these instances was when Aberforth punched him in the face at Ariana's funeral.
• In In The Heart of Darkness Belisarius kicks Malwa spymaster Nandi Lal in the nose, permanently disfiguring him. Afterwards, Nandi Lal stops being Faux Affably Evil and becomes more openly nasty to match his new, ogreish appearance.
• Joey Pigza Swallowed The Key: Joey accidentally cuts off the tip of a girl's nose in class with scissors.
• In Journey to the West, the Yellow-Tusked White Elephant King, as his name implies, uses his trunk as a weapon to grab his enemies and suck out their souls. He's defeated when Sun Wukong shoves the Ruyi Jingu Bang in his nostrils before snatching him and dragging him from his palace all the way to where his companions wait: the poor monster even speaks with a nasal lisp after that mishap.
• In Just So Stories, elephants have trunks because an overly-curious baby elephant made the mistake of went to ask a crocodile what it wanted for lunch and bit down on the baby's nose, stretching it into a trunk over the course of the ensuing tug-of-war. Then, when the other elephants asked how the baby had gotten its trunk, it told them that they'd have to ask the crocodile: by the end of the story, every elephant has a trunk, which are somehow passed onto the next generation.
• Monstrous Regiment has Corporal Strappi demand the newly recruited Private Perks demonstrate "his" sword skills. Perks proceeds to show what he learned from ol' soldier Gummy Abens by knocking Strappi's sword to the side and headbutting him in the nose, ending the fight quickly and earning massive respect from Sergent Jackrum. Strappi's speech is affected for the rest of the scene and his nose remains swollen for a while afterwards.
• In The Moomins, a hattifattener (little electric creature) zaps the Hemulan on the nose.
• Homer's epic The Odyssey has mighty warrior Odysseus return home to find a bevy of horndogs sniffing up his wife, Penelope. Odysseus goes all hacky-slashy on them, then has disloyal servants hanged. Lastly, Odysseus deals with treacherous goatherd Melanthios by cutting off his nose, ears, genitals, hands and feet, in that order. If the bleed-out doesn't kill him, septic infection will.
• Mr. Men:
  • When Mr Mischief tries to steal a sleeping wizard's wand, the wand screams for help, and the wizard seizes Mr Mischief's nose, which is extremely painful.
    Mr Mischief: Led go ob by node!
  • Most appropriately, with Mr Nosey. When the people decide they have had enough of him sticking his nose into their business, "accidents" keep happening to his nose, such as being painted red, or injured.
  • When Little Miss Naughty is about to wake Mr Lazy by knocking on his door, somebody invisible tweaks her nose.
• Red Dwarf:
  • Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers introduces George McIntyre negotiating with a group of debt collectors - one of them toting a pair of industrial cable cutters. The conversation ends with McIntyre having his nose removed with the cutters and being made to eat it in front of everyone in the coffee lounge.
  • While surveying Garbage World for any sign of Lister in Better Than Life, Kryten takes a sniff of the air. His nose immediately suffers an overload and explodes; being a mechanoid, Kryten easily replaces it, but the next one explodes as well.
  • Backwards delivers a quadruple whammy: in combat with a gang of cowboys in Kryten's virtual world, Rimmer punches a man's nose flat "like a cowpie"; then, he tackles the next man in line by hooking two fingers up his nose and flipping him over his head, into a card table; later, after the Agonoid virus spreads to the VR console, Cat loses badly in a fight with Pestilence and ends up getting smashed in the face with a hitching post, squishing his nose against one cheek; then, Lister gets the Cat's unconscious body thrown on top of him, breaking his nose as well.
• Tyrion Lannister in A Song of Ice and Fire ends up having most of his nose hacked off during an attempt on his life during the Battle of Blackwater. Already regarded with disdain for being a dwarf, the hideous scars make him even more reviled than before - and make him a very recognizable fugitive when he has to go on the run.
• In one of the Treehouse books, they think the world is going to explode but it doesn't; however, Mr. Big Nose's nose does explode.

Live-Action TV

• In the first Blackadder Prince Edmund seems to have some experience with this given his considerable collection of nose hooks.
  • In the Series 2 episode "Bells" Queenie threatens to cut off the nose of Edmund's fiance if it is prettier than Queenie's.
  • In the third series episode "Sense and Senility," at any mention of the name of the Scottish Play, the two actors must ward off evil spirits with a bizarre series of motions that conclude with them twisting each other's noses. Naturally, Blackadder goes out of his way to mention it at every possible opportunity, and the actors are left clutching their noses in pain.
• The Brady Bunch: in "The Subject Was Noses," Marsha gets hit by a football in the nose, causing it to swell up and ruining a date. Plus, it leads to the fondly-remembered, memetic line: "Ooh, my nose!"
• The Bugaloos nemesis, Benita Bizarre, has two bumbling henchmen: Woofer and Tweeter. Usually, when these two goofballs fail an assignment or otherwise displease Benita, she will seize the connector cords that each has in the middle of its face, and connect the two together. Judging by Woofer and Tweeter's flailing and yowling, this cross-connection is painful.
• The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance:
  • The Skeksis Emperor always wears a silver beak-cover, even while at the spa. As it turns out, this is because his attempts to harness the Darkening have begun to corrupt his body: under the covering, his nostrils have decayed, leaving a huge rotten pit in his beak.
  • In keeping with his nature as the Butt-Monkey of the Skeksis, the Scientist is smacked in the beak with a scepter after giving the Emperor news he doesn't want to hear.
• Farscape:
  • Crichton goes for Prince Clavor's nose after the royal pain sends a gang of assassins to kill him in "Look At The Princess Part 2." Having already punched him in the face, he grabs Clavor by the nose and forces him to nod along with his demands... and Clavor has rather a lot of nose to grab.
  • When he finally appears in "Liars Guns And Money Part 2," Ka Jothee is is sporting a particularly vicious-looking scar across his nose, believed to be a souvenir of his days as a slave. In "Die Me Dichotomy," he admits that he'd been mutilating himself to remove any signs of his Luxan ancestry, possibly including the Luxan beak-nose.
  • Rygel gets his nose broken by Crichton in "Self-Inflicted Wounds Part 1," following a botched attempt to stage a getaway with the Farscape module. He spends a good chunk of the remaining episode with a bandage over his wounded nose-slits.
  • Aeryn returns in "Promises" with a contagion-induced case of Heat Delirium, and needs to be kept bedridden despite her insistence on saving the day; Noranti attempts to deepen her sleep with a handful of sedative powder - only for the "unconscious" Aeryn to grab her arm and slam the entire handful of powder up Noranti's nostrils, simultaneously bopping her in the nose and dosing her unconscious.
  • In "Coup By Clam," the doctor that's been holding the crew hostage via poisoned mollusks ends up having the tip of his Sinister Schnoz bitten off by Rygel.
• In The Knick, Abigail Alford, a former lover of Dr. John Thackery arrives at the hospital to ask him to examine her nose: is it happens, it's been ravaged by syphilis from her promiscuous ex-husband. Thackery suggests a grueling live graft procedure in which tissue on her arm is grafted to her face.
• In the Mr. Meaty episode "Schnozzola", Josh and Parker try to remove Ashley's zit, but they end up burning her nose off of her face. And then a rat gets to it...
• In the NCIS episode "Corporal Punishment", a PTSD-afflicted marine breaks out of a psych ward. When Team Gibbs find him, the marine attacks them as he believes they're the same enemies who captured and tortured him in Iraq. Tony winds up getting his nose broken during the fight to subdue the marine.
• Pennyworth: In Season 1, Lord Harwood is arrested and tortured by the so-called "Barbers" at the Tower of London. They cut off his nose offscreen before he was thrown out in the streets.
• Red Dwarf:
  • In "Demons And Angels," the Low crew demonstrate their ability to remote-control Lister by having him slam a supply cabinet door on his nose.
  • After the Armageddon virus locks them into a virtual reality scenario, the crew are forced to manually remove their gloves and helmets, resulting in the Cat nearly pulling Lister's nose off in his efforts to free him.
• It was an instance of this that caused George to break up with a girlfriend on Seinfeld when his girl of the week got plastic surgery to have her nose shortened, only for it to be botched and the ensuing corrective surgery to gross him out while it healed.
• In the Squid Game episode "Red Light, Green Light", Gi-hun is cornered by a gang of loan sharks in a public bathroom and punched in the nose hard enough to make him bleed. The ringleader even threatens to shove a blade up Gi-hun's nose so that he can collect the blood and make soup from it. Fortunately, this is just an intimidation tactic to force Gi-hun to sign over his physical rights - allowing the loan sharks to sell his organs if he can't pay up by next month. For good measure, he's given another thump in the nose just so he has an ersatz inkpad to sign with his thumbprint.
• During one of the few genuinely violent confrontations in The Thick of It, Malcolm Tucker impulsively punches Glen Cullen in the nose. Though it's not actually broken, it does bleed pretty spectacularly and ends up getting Malcolm in hot water with the media.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: In "A Day In the Life", Gabrielle constantly tries to hit Xena (of course without any avail) as a training session. At the end of the day, when Xena is finally dead-tired, Gabrielle brings down a bo-staff volley on her nose. Unfortunately, she now can speculate if Xena let her land the hit.

Music

• The nursery rhyme "Sing a song of sixpence" ends with the maid in the garden hanging out the clothes, when down came a blackbird, and pecked off her nose.

Mythology

• In the Indian epos "Ramayana", the rakshasi Surpanakha flirts with Rama, and when he doesn't fall for Cute Monster Girl, threatens his wife. His brother Lakshman cuts off her nose. (It might have been an elaborate Thanosetos Gambit against Surpanakha's brother Ravana who of course wants to avenge her and is killed by Rama.)
• There's a Japanese folk tale revolving around a beggar who stole a tengu's enchanted fan - capable of increasing the length of noses - and conned an entire town by lengthening the noses of random citizens, before charging them money to have their noses restored to their original state. Unfortunately, Laser-Guided Karma soon follows for the beggar who absent-mindedly fans himself to sleep using the enchanted fan, which leads to the beggar's nose shooting all the way to the heavens. It just happens that builders working for God are working on a bridge and upon seeing the beggar's nose, mistook it for a pillar and nailing it on the spot.

Pro Wrestling

• Trish Stratus had her nose broken by Lita after a match during the former's 2004 heel run, leaving her to wear a giant protective mask for the next two months.
• It was a case of this that led up to Vader's eye popping out of socket; before Vader had even entered the ring in his February 10th, 1990 match against Stan Hansen, the bull rope Hansen liked carried to the ring and swing around hit Vader in the face, breaking his nose. Vader, now pissed off, rushed Hansen and the two started trading blows for real. Hansen got him with a right cross that saw his thumb catch the eye and pop it out by accident. It also didn't help that Stan Hansen is Blind Without 'Em
• This was what Madusa used to take time off after the debuting Bertha Fay attacked her after she had regained the WWE's women's title in 1995. In reality, it was so she could get breast implants.
• John Cena had his nose horribly broken by Seth Rollins knee in a match in 2015. As you might imagine, Cena gave Rollins some receipts in return.
• Sheamus' nose had it rough in 2021. Humberto Carrillo accidentally smashed it during a match in May of that year, not enough to take Sheamus away from wrestling, but nevertheless requiring surgery and forcing him to wear a protective mask for several months. Unfortunately, during a match against Jeff Hardy in September, Sheamus would dramatically rip off his mask after getting the upper hand, only for Hardy to accidentally smash his face with his elbow, breaking Sheamus' nose again.

Video Games

• The Street Kid prologue of Cyberpunk 2077 starts with V having to manually reset their broken nose after a fight they had just been in... and ends with them having to reset it again after a botched car heist. Ouch.
• The Secret World features this cropping up as a natural consequence of mummification, with the first step involving an iron hook being inserted into the nostrils to extract the brains... except the Atenists inflict this on their victims while they're still alive.

Webcomics

• Kiwi Blitz: Steffi gets hit in the nose by Raccoon's metal claw, and her nose is red and bloody for the rest of the day - which hasn't ended after 80 pages.

Web Original

• Whateley Universe: From Dorms of Our Lives, Season 5 (Part 4), Rah-rah's injuries from the previous day, covered in the previous part, are described:
  The girl code-named Rah-Rah looked more like Rah-Raccoon, sporting two black eyes, a busted lip, and a nose swelled up like an elephant seal's.

Western Animation

• In the American Dad! episode "National Treasure 4: Baby Franny: She's Doing Well: The Hole Story", Francine finds Henri Watkin, the fireman who rescued her living as a hermit in the bottom of a well for decades. When Henri is reintroduced to his wife, the two reconcile, and then he suddenly bites off her nose.
• Family Guy: In the episode "Chap Stewie", Stewie is throwing a tantrum and Meg tries to calm him down. The second she picks him up, Stewie headbutts her in the nose, causing blood to splatter all over her.
• In the season 2 opener of Harley Quinn after Penguin taunts Harley while her lower body is frozen in a block of ice, she responds by biting off his nose.
• King of the Hill: In "Bwah My Nose", Hank suffers a broken nose while practicing for a football game. After surgery, he finds himself more attractive and becomes obsessed with protecting it.
• Mighty Max: One of the steps which the Egyptians took when mummifying their pharaohs was to remove the brain, through the nostril, with a large hook. Max and Virgil very nearly learned this firsthand, while alive.
• The Owl House: In "Elsewhere and Elsewhen", after being betrayed by Philip Wittebane and used as bait for a Stonesleeper, Luz and Lilith confront him. When Philip is completely unrepentant, Lilith socks him in the face so hard she breaks his nose. This facial trauma persists in the modern day, where Philip, now Emperor Belos, still has a very obviously crooked nose, and the scar that was left on his face that day would eventually expand into the band of necrotic flesh stretching across his face.
• A Thousand and One... Americas: Played for Laughs when, in the nineteenth episode, a crab that was recently captured by a native woman pinches Lon's nose. He spends a long time trying to brush off the crab, but then the woman removes the crab for him. She jokingly remarks that crabs are captured to be eaten for humans, not for them to eat humans or dogs.
• Total Drama:
  • Max isn't paying attention in "A Blast From the Past" and walks into Topher when he suddenly stops. It's his nose which takes the brunt of the impact.
  • Sugar falls down a couple of feet on her nose in "Sky Fall". It bleeds badly, which reminds Sugar of a time she stepped on a rake and was smashed in the face with the handle. On the upside, the distraction of having to keep her nose up to not get blood everywhere helps her over a difficult obstacle by pure unmindfulness.

Real Life

• The phrase "cutting off the nose to spite the face" is believed to have stemmed from various historical incidents in which nuns and other pious women cut off their noses in order to avoid being raped by Viking raiders. In some cases, it saved the recipients from rape, but resulted in the Vikings killing them anyway.
• Amputation of the nose was a popular punishment throughout the world, existing as far back as the Code of Hammurabi and continuing up to the Renaissance: quite apart from being immensely painful, facial disfigurement guaranteed that the criminal would be easy to identify from then on, and the nose proved the hardest for an offender to disguise.
  • In pre-dynastic China, this was one of the Five Punishments — the other four including facial tattooing, foot amputation, castration, and death.
  • In Ancient Egypt, magistrates that exploited their office for personal gain were to be deported — but not before having their noses cut off.
  • In Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, nose removal was used as a punishment for adultery; in 12th-century Sicily, it was also used as a penalty for soliciting prostitutes.
  • Byzantine Emperor Justinian II had his nose severed after being overthrown in a coup. The logic behind this that the Emperor exercised his power on God's behalf, and since God was perfect, the Emperor had to be perfect too. Nonetheless, he was able to reclaim the throne after a ten-year exile, with a new nose made of gold.
  • In the 16th century, Pope Sixtus V responded to the rise in crime throughout Rome by decreeing that highwaymen would be punished by the removal of their noses; by all accounts, the threat of lifelong disfigurement worked.
  • It was also used as a punishment for libel and similar offenses, most commonly in Poland, Naples, and England. In the case of the latter, Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe fame only narrowly managed to avoid being disfigured for seditious pamphlets, instead being sentenced to public humiliation in the pillory.
• Snorting drugs has a very nasty effect on the septum: the nosebleeds so often encountered in cocaine users isn't due to any effect of the chemical itself, but due to the fact that the inside of your nose is being rasped raw with powder. In time, this can lead to serious side-effects, including perforation of the septum, damage to the soft palate, nasal ulcers, or even necrosis. In extreme cases, the entire nose might have to be amputated.
• Bibi Aisha made headlines back in 2009 and 2010 when it was revealed that her husband, father-in-law, and three other family members sliced her ears and nose off and left her to die in the mountains after trying to flee their abusive household. She has fortunately since gotten surgery to replace it.
• Famous astronomer Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel and wore a prosthetic.
• Former Miami Dolphins fullback and Hall of Famer Larry Csonka was infamous for the number of times his playing style broke his nose, with at least a dozen recorded instances (Csonka himself stopped counting after ten) with his teammates half jokingly taking bets on which side of his face his nose was going to be on by the end of a game. All the breaks left his nose deformed until he got corrective surgery shortly before his stint on American Gladiators.
• Roald Dahl had two accidents involving his nose, described in his autobiographies. In Boy, he tells of how his nose was sliced almost completely off as he shot through the windscreen in a car accident. In Going Solo, after crashing his fighter plane, he mentions how a surgeon told him he would give Dahl a lovely new nose.

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