The darkening of the cheeks is cause by ambient occlusion. AO does not take into account that there is a reflective surface (water). In real life, the water would reflect sky light onto the lower cheek and keep it bright. If the water plane was actually a ground plane, it would and should darken the cheeks. That's what AO is doing here - treating the water plane like an ordinary object that blocks ambient light.

I suppose you could fix it by making the water plane invisible to raytracing. (Check box on the properties/parameters window - second tab.) This sounds like it would make the reflections go away, but it is ok. The water itself is not being seen in any reflections, so you lose nothing. This will make the water plane "invisible" to the AO calculation.

The scratchy look seems to be related to the hair. I suspect that the transparency mapping of the hair creates visible gaps. When viewed from a typical viewing angle, this is not a problem, but the reflections give us a perspective as though we are under her ear, looking almost straight up. From that angle, it reveals to us the reality that the hair is not 3-dimensional, with a definite thickness, but paper thin, with large gaps in it.

When you said you tried increasing the bump amount, I'm wondering what exactly you did. For example, starting from .001 millimeter, .002 is an "increase" (in fact, double) but not actually significant enough for you to see any real wave.

Before you tell me what value you used, you should check what your Poser Display Units are set to. The bump value depends on your chosen units. If I tell you to set it to .1, I mean .1 inches, because I always work in inches in Poser. If you are set to some other unit, you must convert, or you must first change your Poser Display Units preference to inches. Unless you and I agree on what units we use, my numbers and your numbers are different.

Having said that, I generally work with water bump height around .05 to .2 inches. Any more than that, and I go to displacement instead of bump.

The overall curvature created by the waves is a function of the height and the width of the wave. Increasing the height to .1 inch will produce nice curves, but only if the width of a wave is around an inch. Your wave tops look like they are about 3 feet or about a meter apart. A .1 inch high wave that is 1 meter wide will not produce much curve at all. It will look very flat.

Because you have little curve, the Edge_Blend has nothing to work with. There must be significant curvature in order to see variation in reflection amount based on angle.

That is why I suggested that you should decrease the scale of the wave generator. You have not shown me your material, so I don't know what you used. Whether it is Fractal_Sum, fBm, Turbulence, whatever, they all have scale parameters. Adjusting those scale parameters will alter the size (width) of those waves.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)