50 Most Beautiful People for 2011

Age: 30
Hometown: Boston
Political party: Democratic
Relationship status: Single

Manoucheka Attime says confidence is the key to beauty. If you’re confident, everything falls into place, she says.

She works as Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) correspondence director, supervising a team of seven staff assistants who handle about 60,000 constituent emails each week.

Attime, who used to work at the public relations firm Weber Shandwick, has the poise of a woman who knows the importance of image, and she likes to lend her image-making skills to friends in her free time.

“When my friends are running off to a last-minute party, I play make-up artist for them because I find it so fun,” she says. “Mascara and lip gloss go a long way. If I was on a desert island, I’d take concealer, mascara and lip gloss.”

Attime dreams of being a political analyst after she hones her political acumen on Capitol Hill. Her next career leap would be to journalism; she’s thinking about graduate school so she can learn more about writing, video shooting and production.

“I love talking about it and debating it,” she says of politics. “I’m so fortunate to be on Capitol Hill where it’s all working.”

She’s spent the last year focusing on her career, but thinks maybe it’s time to start dating more.

For her, a good date is dinner and conversation.

“It’s not about the huge gesture, but the small things that show they care,” she says.

She likes Washington because it’s such a transient city and just about everyone is from somewhere else. It makes it easier to meet people as “everyone is trying to get to know people,” unlike her hometown of Boston, where “friends often know each other from junior high.”

She’s lost her Boston accent but not her passionate devotion to the Red Sox, Patriots and Bruins.

When one friend asked why she was rooting so hard for the Bruins in the Stanley Cup finals considering she’s not even a hockey fan, her answer was simple enough: “I’m a Boston fan.”

—Alexander Bolton

---