This has been bugging me for a while now... my poor Wood Elf has a dark halo around her mouth. In fact I noticed Jenassa has the same issue as well:

http://minus.com/lbkg505MJrAWqh

The only related mod I have installed is: XCE Xenius Character Enhancement

Does anyone else experience this on Wood Elves and Dark Elves?

My hunch is the normal map, both in XCE and the vanilla game, are "optimized" for the default big lips shape as seen on many female Nords, and it does not really adapt to the thin lip shape.

I'm proficient with Photoshop if needed... but which files would be involved in solving this?

- female/femalehead_msn.dds ?
- darkelffemale/femalehead_msn.dds?

Strange though because you can see Jenassa has a dark halo next to the pointy bits on the top lip, and yet the femalehead_msn.dds shows the "thin" lip shape.

Could it be the lips in tintmasks ?

- femaleheadhighelf_lips.dds ?

But this one clearly looks smaller and thinner than femaleheadnord_lips.dds so it seems alright.