Manipulating flavour models with invariants

Quark and lepton mass matrices are unphysical in their full generality. We present a simple interpretation of mass matrix elements based on the trace invariant to reduce the initial arbitrariness. In this parametrization, we can reproduce certain popular flavour textures from an aligmnent mechanism. Similarly, slight misaligment easily reproduces Froggatt-Nielsen-like suppression factors without the need of a large scale hierarchy.