  We explore the concept of effective alignments: contractions of multiple
flavour symmetry breaking flavon fields. These contractions give rise to
directions that are hard or impossible to obtain directly by breaking the
flavour symmetry. Within this context, and using $S_4$ as the flavour symmetry
to exemplify, we perform a phenomenological check of lepton flavour models
built from pairing any two effective alignments up to order 2 (in flavon
contractions). The check is performed for each pair of effective alignments in
a framework with models of constrained sequential dominance type, in a basis
where the charged leptons are diagonal. We thus obtain an indication of which
effective alignments are interesting for model building, within this so-called
$S_4$ landscape. We find three types of viable topologies and provide examples
of models realizing this strategy for each topology.
