Apparently in some European countries they’d wear special helmets that protected pretty much everywhere but the cheeks cos that way you could get a dashing dueling scar on your cheek rather than an eye gouged out.

That was Prussia/Germany, and IIRC it pretty much turned into a hazing/rite of passage thing for aristocrats at universities, where the scars shifted from being a consequence of dueling to a sign that someone stood still and explicitly allowed someone to hit them in the face with a sword because the scars were a prestige mark signaling an aristocratic military education.