Once upon a time, a person could acquire a working knowledge of the standard checklist of female insecurities before graduating middle school. There was the horror of being too short or too tall. The anguish of being too fat and sometimes even too thin. The absolute mortification of bad skin and bad hair. Bodies in general were fraught. Boobs, their own specific minefield. So I might have assumed back then that I would reach adulthood with a basic index of the major possible vulnerabilities.

But then TikTok was invented, and the list ballooned. Your nostrils can flare too much. The distance between your nose and your upper lip can be too long. Your ears can protrude or lack an attractive shape. You can have poor “jaw posture”, undesirable toe proportions, and a disadvantageous collarbone depth. You can still have bad teeth, with or without braces. It turns out the skin on your knees can be insufficiently taut.

Recently, users found a new point of obsession and dissection: their side profile. Using an outline tool to view the shape and alignment of facial features, the trend finds people examining the exact proportions of their faces viewed at 90 degrees. Some keep their focus on their own visages. Others have racked up hundreds of thousands of views turning the lens on celebrities.

Angelina Jolie is among the celebrities being vaunted for her bone structure on TikTok.

You can guess the kind of faces that do numbers: high, accentuated cheekbones, defined jawlines, bumpless noses. Methodical videos break down the nature of the harmonising balance: how the slant of a brow can complement the curve of an ear, how a hairline can frame a forehead just so. Hudson Williams – of mania – has inspired dozens of these. So have Angelina Jolie and Natalie Portman. Elsewhere on the app, countless videos find people sobbing over their small chins and dorsal humps. You could watch those too, but who wants to spend their one wild and precious life doing that?

I should know. For several adolescent years, I begged my parents for a nose job, imagining the higher plane to which I’d ascend if I had a shaved-down tip and symmetrical nostrils. I grew up in New York, where it was not totally unusual for someone to return from a summer break in high school with new anatomy. But my parents were flatly uninterested. They liked to tell me my nose was “noble”. They were unmoved when I retorted that that the Habsburg chin – famouly protruding and the result of prodigious inbreeding – was also technically “noble”.

Eventually, I moved on from my desire for surgical intervention, not because I had achieved some kind of radical acceptance or self-love, but because submitting to a rhinoplasty seemed both expensive and a little cliché. So I channelled Barbra Streisand. I watched Bradley Cooper admire Lady Gaga’s nose in A Star Is Born. I still occasionally wondered which surgeon a certain celebrity went to for her now objectively perfect nose, but only fleetingly.

Then I started working in magazines, giving me access to both experts in the semi-dark arts of “facial balancing” and sprawling beauty closets. I tested at-home microcurrent tools, like the NuFace, that of course promised nothing in the realm of reduction, but did give my cheekbones a noticeable boost. I tried two iterations of the expensive Lyma laser device, which can be remarkably effective at smoothing out fine lines and improving skin texture, but only if used consistently (which I never have). I interviewed dozens of plastic surgeons, one of whom sat across the table from me and blithely told me – mid-conversation and unprompted – that he could “do something” about my nose. And I of course developed a stable of go-to dermatologists, whom I sometimes peppered with questions like: “Should I be thinking more about my side profile?”

“I am not hearing a tonne about optimising profiles,” says Dr Evan Rieder, a board-certified physician in both dermatology and psychiatry who practices in New York, “though when questions do arise, the same concerns come up time and time again – the cheeks, nose, chin, and jawline.”

Rieder tells me that he counsels patients that the best and safest way to tweak the nose is in the operating room (he is not a fan of the so-called and also TikTok viral “liquid rhinoplasty” that dermatologists can administer), but that he can treat the cheeks, chin and jawline quite well. He doesn’t endorse or recommend social media trends (he finds them “mind numbing”), but he does see the emphasis on fundamental bone structure as evidence of an increasing awareness from the general public that the filler mania of the past decade (or what he calls “misguided cheek and mid-face overinflation”) was overkill.

“We are seeing a course correction,” he says. “There is a meaningful impact we can make by using very small volumes of soft tissue filler to restore people’s appearances to a previous state.” For profile and overall enhancement, that means injecting “raindrops and fine threads of filler” in the temples, the deep fat of the cheek, the nasolabial folds, the angle of the jaw, and the triangles of shadowing underneath the lips. He will also sometimes suggest treatments like Sculptra, or ultrasound therapies like Sofwave.

In other words, TikTok is not real life. But it is possible to renovate a person’s facial architecture with low-volume, high-impact facial filler and select procedures. It sounds appealing and simple. I’d like a lifted brow and more sculpted cheekbones. I shudder to think what the TikTok mob would have to say about my nose.

Still, I can’t bring myself to make an appointment. Instead, I realise that for around the same price as a session with an upscale dermatologist, I can secure a flight to Italy in late summer. It is the land of aquiline noses and impudent sun exposure, and I have been invited to visit Borgo Santo Pietro, an estate and hotel that grows much of the food served in its restaurant and dozens of the ingredients that compromise its on-site skincare line called Seed to Skin.

At the spa, I am treated to a 90-minute facial, which involves intensive jaw and cheek massage. For a few candlelit hours that evening, I marvel at the effects. I feel sculpted and lifted, like a walking, talking “after” photo. From the side, I look as harmonious as I ever have. I consider how TikTok might assess the improvement, but then I remember I’m in an actual Tuscan paradise, and I stop looking in mirrors. I do not think about my nose for the rest of the trip.

star Ella Rubin, whose character’s side profile is remarked upon in the show.

Still, when I get home, I vow to recommit to gua sha and all manner of facial devices. And in the meantime, I email the make-up artist Suzy Gerstein, who somehow ensured that not a single bad photo was taken of me at my wedding. I think of Hudson Williams. I press her for her secrets.

“Generally speaking, flash photography tends to flatten the features and wash out natural contrast, so despite my preference for natural-looking skin, I tend to sculpt more when getting clients ready to be photographed,” she tells me. “I love underpainting to accentuate unique bone structure and create a strong profile.” She recommends products like m.ph beauty’s Underpainting Face Palette and Westman Atelier Face Trace Contour Stick, which are blendable and have a skin-like finish. Because they’re meant to be used under foundation, “overdoing it” is less of a risk. For the contour phobic, she recommends Makeup By Mario’s SoftSculpt Transforming Skin Enhancer, which is somewhere between a contour stick and a bronzer and safe for clueless users like me.

Of course, she and I get to reminiscing about my wedding, which was beautiful, and I take a screenshot of a photo taken in profile and send it to her. She still remembers the product line-up she used, which she runs through in detail: underpainting palette, foundation, sculpting cream, powder contour, blush, mascara, pencils, shadows, brow gel. I know I’ll never be patient enough to recreate the look, and I’m sure TikTok would have notes. But that’s fine. I’m not interested in dissection or duplication. Life’s loveliest moments are fleeting. Best to face forward and keep moving.