It is sad how as a society we are obsessed with ranking people in terms of how attractive they are.
After all, beauty is subjective and is much harder to quantify than say, the world’s fastest runner or the highest mountain ever to be climbed.
But still – year after year – there are yet more lists pitting exceedingly photogenic people against each other; making mere mortals such as myself feel evermore like a particularly weathered ogre.
Margot Robbie is one of those beings so breathtakingly, impossibly beautiful I can’t quite imagine her existing in the same world as clogged toilets and delayed rubbish bin collections.
However, not even she is free from the scrutiny of the TC Candler and The Independent Critics’ The 100 Most Beautiful Faces Of 2017.
This is a slightly surreal list which weighs up cheekbones and jawlines the way restaurant critics pick apart Michelin star menus.
The Wolf of Wall Street actress came in at 33rd this year, which just goes to show no matter how dazzlingly glamorous you are, there will be people ready and waiting to compare you with others.
The winner for the this year was 19-year-old Filipino-American actress Liza Soberano, known for playing strawberry farmer Maria Agnes Calay in romantic TV show Forevermore.
16-year-old French model Thylane Blondeau came in second, just showing you can never be too young to have your looks analysed and dissected by strangers. Sigh.
In third place was yet another youngster, 18-year-old Taiwanese singer Chou Tzu-yu who is a member of the K-pop girl band Twice.
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Thankfully, there is still hope for those of us who have left high school behind but still long to be looked at under a magnifying glass.
Winner of the 2012 list Emilia Clarke was voted 26th while Natalie Portman came in 50th place.
The face of 2011 winner Emma Watson has now slipped to 14th place, which I am sure is proving to be a real existential crisis for the Brown University graduate and UN Women Goodwill ambassador.
According to TC Candler this list is ‘representative of the modern ideal of worldwide beauty’:
Aesthetic perfection is only one of the criteria. Grace, elegance, originality, daring, passion, class, poise, joy, promise, hope… they are all embodied in a beautiful face.
With those criteria in mind, TC Candler and the IC members select only 100 faces out of the approximately 90,000+ female celebrities (which works out to less than 0.0012%).
It is a thankless task, as no individual will ever agree with all the choices.
However, the general consensus has been that the Independent Critics have created a celebratory list that cherishes the feminine aesthetic and opens the world’s eyes to a unique, diverse and international collection of beautiful faces.
In the name of equality, male faces are now too being categorised accordingly, following the introduction of The 100 Most Handsome Faces List five years ago.
21-year-old K-pop singer V – whose actual name is Kim Tae-Hyung – took the top spot.
Khal Drogo himself – Jason Momoa – was voted as having the second most handsome face while Nocturnal Animals Armie Hammer was judged to be third best, face-wise.
Our faces are indeed somewhat important in terms of forming an identity and being able to recognise each other.
However, don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have the most symmetrical or proportionate features.
There are much more important attributes to have, as the many talented men and women on these deeply questionable lists have shown.
Jules studied English Literature with Creative Writing at Lancaster University before earning her masters in International Relations at Leiden University in The Netherlands (Hoi!). She then trained as a journalist through News Associates in Manchester. Jules has previously worked as a mental health blogger, copywriter and freelancer for various publications.