Never lose an opportunity of seeing something beautiful,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “for beauty is God’s handwriting.” The American essayist presumably failed to countenance the emergence of Twitter, where divinity is seemingly harder sought, and where everyone from Hollywood actors to actual babies have been zealously dunked on in recent weeks for their physical appearance. God help the world if my graduation photos ever make it online.
Where else could you read the takedown that a beaming Emilia Clarke “didn’t just hit the wall” but “flew into it full speed on a dragon”, or see a perfectly normal photo of Paul Mescal captioned “27 years old”, as if no one rocking a moustache and looking a bit tired could possibly have been born in the mid-Nineties? Where else, indeed, could you dip into the psyche of a person who spent long enough analysing a picture of Rihanna’s nine-month-old son to conclude that “his forehead & face alone make him quite un-handsome”? How does one go about securing a role in the department of celebrity baby forehead handsomeness calculation?
