My sister Lizzie used to say that the difference between “attractive” and “beautiful” was cheekbones. Obviously, the only people who make these sorts of pronouncements are those who have killer-cheekbones (and she does).
That aside, she may have a point. Why else would the world seem to have gone crazy trying to get them? The mania surrounding contouring — the art of highlighting and lowlighting different parts of your face to enhance the shape of certain features (the bridge of the nose, the roundness of the cheekbones, etc) — not only plagues my Instagram feed but has spawned a sub-industry of “contouring kits”.
Kim Kardashian is largely responsible for the obsession, even though she appears to have toned it down lately, and it’s now a fixed point for every 16-year-old vlogging on YouTube. I’ve seen rectangles, triangles and circles of painstakingly painted-on foundation, powder, bronzer and highlighter, all of which remind me of my childhood painting-by — numbers kits. The results are invariably neither attractive nor beautiful; they just look odd.