This is why police sketches don't work well on people with close relationship to the subject of the sketch but work rather well for law enforcement and the gene

This is why police sketches don't work well on people with close relationship to the subject of the sketch but work rather well for law enforcement and the general public. When you rely on a sketch you don't rely on it being a photocopy of the subject but on specific features matching the actual appearance of the subject. For example eye distance, brow height, nose shape, chin shape matching up 2-3 sketch features with a suspected target tend to lead to fairly high likelihood of a correct match.