It's the features

If you look good without a speck of makeup or a spear of hair showing, wearing white that yellows your skin and teeth, and black that squashes you down like a heavy weight, why, you are it, the real McCoy. A woman lived in Greece like that one time by the name of Phryne. When Rosetta made her acquaintance long years after this in the pages of Galen, the weird old doctor who lived in the second century A.D., she thought of Sister Genevieve, because she was one person who could do what Phryne did at a party one time, lead off a game of Follow the Leader by washing her face in a bowl of water and coming up shining like a rose, a stunt not popular, of course, with the other hetaerae, whose painted faces after they were washed disgraced them. It’s the features.
     --From Variation West