Data points (aka "anecdotes) here…my biological sister turned out to be just as cute (well, as best a brother can tell of course) when she was older than she was when younger, as is her daughter (now 16)-proportions etc. all pretty much the same. Likewise, my two biological sisters clearly resemble their grade school selves now (early-mid 40’s)-(tho that can only be done via the miracle of photography in their case).
My middle biological niece (5 1/2) looks like she is going to be dynamite, but some say that you can’t really predict that at such an age. Has that been your experience, or is it more like my other examples?
One thing to bear in mind is that children’s cuteness is almost totally judged in terms of their faces, and there isn’t an awful lot of variation among body shapes when you’re talking about prepubescent kids. The attractiveness of adult women is judged to a large extent in terms of their figures, which vary a lot more than kids’ shapes do. So you can get a five-year-old with a beautiful face and your standard-issue five-year-old shape, and she’ll be considered gorgeous - but when she’s twenty, she could still have an equally beautiful face but have turned out to be short and squat, and she won’t be considered nearly as gorgeous. Or a five-year-old with a plain face will be considered plain, but when she grows up, even if her face is still just as plain, she could have a dynamite figure and be considered a babe.
Also, child actors are frequently chosen because they’re cute, not attractive. I mean, Haley Joel Osment isn’t a good looking guy, and he wasn’t a handsome kid either. But he was a cute kid. Same goes for Macaulay Culkin.
In the same vein, a lot of people who are attractive adults had much the same facial features, but arranged on a kid’s face, so they looked kind of weird. Once they had the bone structure changes that go with puberty, the features fit.
There’s also the idea that youth = beauty, so that even homely kids who are 17 usually have a certain fresh-facedness to them that they lose when they’re all grown up.
I’ve known more than one child who was not especially attractive as an infant or small child who grew up to be stunningly gorgeous. In one case a new baby was such that you might say she was cute, just to be polite, but all you could honestly say was how healthy she looked. Fifteen years later she was simply lovely.
Sometimes beauty is in a a person carries herself (or himself, but the best examples I can think of are women). Greta Garbo was absolutely stunning, even though she had a receding chin, was way to tall and broad-shouldered, had uneven teeth, and an odd nose. She had very expressive eyes, but that took practice. She pulled it all together, though, and the overall effect was one of the most beautiful women since we’ve had cameras to record them.
Paget Brewster is no Greta Garbo (who is?) but she has a set of features that taken individually, you wouldn’t think would come together well, and yet she is really striking. It’s mainly in how she carries herself. She’s got a big nose, and somehow it’s one of the sexiest noses I’ve ever seen (and it warms my heart, because I have a big nose too).
I think what the two women have in common is just the way they present themselves. “Dammit, I’m gorgeous, and your opinion doesn’t matter.” Well, that and Hollywood make-up artists, but at some point they were going to auditions with hair and make-up they’d done themselves, and people who knew what to look for saw something.
David Spade actually looked better as a young adult than Culkin, but I don’t think Spade ever had a serious drug habit, and Spade knows what a razor is for. Culkin is really going to look terrible when he’s old. Spade will probably just look old.
The younger sister of an old friend was about 16 when I first new her. She was a smart, great person, so attractive in that way, and I really enjoyed my conversations with her, in a totally non-creepy way (since I’m about 12 or 14 years older than her), but physically, she wasn’t good-looking. She was overweight, mousy, with bad skin and kind of a slumped-over posture, with a moon face and thick glasses.
I didn’t see her for about ten years after that (geography, and she wasn’t my friend, just the much younger kid sister of a friend, so I wasn’t trying to see her).
Then I went to the wedding of my friend. The whole family was there. And this woman walked in who was beyond gorgeous. I mean, she was one of those women who causes every single head to turn and every draw to drop when she comes into the room. It was simply astonishing.
I spoke to her a bit, and she was still smart and a really, really good person and everything she was as a teenager, just drop-dead gorgeous now. It was truly astonishing.
A lot of it is self-confidence and how people carry themselves. And clear skin. My aunt and uncle adopted one of their foster children, who was really homely, and terribly overweight when she first went to live with them. The weight was partly a medical issue, which they got worked out, and she’s still not svelte, but she’s curvy and nice-looking, and I don’t think “fat” is the first word that comes to mind. She was really, I hate to say it, dumpy, but she was: she looked at the ground all the time, and didn’t care enough about herself to keep her hair tidy. Now she wears it up a lot, and it looks great with her face, which has wonderful features that came out when she lost weight-- she went from like 260 to 160 in a couple of years.
She also went from failing all her classes to being on the honor roll, and from wearing clothes that were hand-me-downs from people already shopping at Goodwill to wearing clothes that flattered her, not to mention living with people who cared enough about her to buy her clothes that flattered her, follow up with the doctors on her medical issues, and help her with her homework (actually, my aunt and uncle did a lot more than that: they rebooted her entire education plan).
By the time she was 17, people who hadn’t seen her since she was 14 didn’t recognize her. And she isn’t drop-dead gorgeous, but she is beautiful, in a very sweet and approachable way, and she is also very kind, and developed an attractive personality, after being one of those bullied kids who preemptively strikes out at everyone because she assumes they’re going to come after her.
I was very weird looking as a kid. Huge lips and eyes. Most kids called me fish-face; the others called me Casper because my skin was so white. Fast forward about 16 years and it all worked out.
