With the recent identification of Boston’s “Baby Doe” as Bella Bond, i couldn’t help but notice that the forensic recon was a lot more idealised looking than the human reality.
This also happened with “Delta Dawn” the unidentified toddler from 1982 where the recon looks a lot more adorable than she would have probably looked in life - they’ve pretty much made her look like a child pageant queen.
Bella Bond’s recon was done by a woman so idealising recons are not just confined to male artists.
Not so much idealized as they are supposed to be pretty much the average of possible variations that can be modeled on the data point. The model could be done to make it less idealized and more typically lifelike, but what if that characteristic were skewed in the wrong direction making it look even less like the real person?
I don’t know if they’re idealized in general, but I feel pretty certain that Baby Doe wouldn’t have had the same press coverage without a cherubic beauty pageant model recreation to show on TV.
I’m notoriously bad at recognizing faces after even small changes, so I may be a bad judge of it, but the only thing I find recognizable in this case is that she has brown hair.