Becca Rothfeld in The Point:
She was not beautiful, but she looked like she was. She was practically famous for it in the cloistered social universe of the liberal arts college where I had just arrived. Women whispered about her effortless elegance in the bathrooms at parties, and a man who had dated her for a summer informed me, with the dispassionate assurance of a connoisseur, that she was the hottest girl on campus. The skier who brazenly dozed in Introduction to Philosophy each morning intimated between snores that she looked like Uma Thurman, whom she did not resemble in the least. I knew this even though I had yet to see her for myself, because I had done what anyone with an appetite for truth and beauty would do in 2011, besides enroll in Introduction to Philosophy: I had studied her profile on Facebook—and discovered, much to my surprise and chagrin, an entirely average-looking person, slightly hunched, with a mop of mousy hair.
Her? I thought. This is the great beauty I’ve heard so much about? I was a freshman and prepared to be impressed by my elders, but as I clicked through photo after photo, I could not escape the conclusion that she took after my ancestors. Yes, I nodded as I scrolled grimly on, she had the sickly countenance of an Eastern European peasant at the turn of the century. It was true that she was leggy and lithe, but she also had a great beak of a nose and hands that hung heavily at her sides. I was enormously disillusioned. Could the proto-adult world provide nothing more inspiring than this spectral personage, so evidently lactose-intolerant? Was I doomed to a life of aesthetic deflations?
More here.