Layers of elegance

I have an iPhone X. I put a case on it – a terrific one by a company called Mous Unlimited – and then put on a screen protector. The case takes away a layer of elegance: the phone feels and looks like jewelry and, though the case is nice, it can’t approach that level. The screen protector takes the beautiful, absorbing screen and makes it ordinary. I need the case. I ditched the screen protector, in part because I just can’t take the difference between the real screen and the protected version, and partly because I ‘bought’ the phone from Apple and it comes with AppleCare, which means I only pay like $29 to replace it if I crack it. With the protector on, the elegant gestures remain but they felt like a knock-off, as though this weren’t an X but was instead a phone pretending to be an X. With the protector off, I don’t get the visual and tactile sensations of beauty of form but I get those in the screen images and through the elegant interactions with that screen.