The face is usually the first thing we notice about a person. A face reminds us of our parents, or an old lover, or someone who hurt us. A face sometimes tells us how a person feels, whether they’re anxious, playful, confident, or sullen. Eventually, a face records in its fine lines a lifetime of easy laughter or stubborness. Character may come from within, but a face gives one a sense of identity. Other animals can recognize and greet their kin and friends by smell, but we recognize a person by face. When a new baby is born, the first question asked is: Whom does he or she look like? We have to be able to recognize faces quickly to weave through all the relationships in our complex society, and we’re especially good at spotting a face in a sea of warring stimuli, of recognizing a familiar person from just a few lines of caricature. Actually, we’re better with caricatures. Robert Munro and Michael Kubovy, researchers at the University of Oregon, showed drawings of faces to a group of students. When the students saw the same faces again later, they recognized them, but were faster and more certain about it if the faces were distorted, the features elongated or exaggerated. “Why should a distortion of a face be remembered better than the face itself?” Munro asked. He and Kubovy believe it’s because the brain remembers faces in the same shorthand way, fixing on the features that make one face different from another. Because a caricature is closer to the brain’s version of a person, it’s easier to recognize than a complete portrait. Some brain-injured people suffer from a condition known as prosopagnosia, which leaves them unable to recognize faces. In severe cases, they cannot even recognize their own reflections in a mirror.
A fascination with faces is a human trait. Portraiture goes back at least sixteen thousand years, to the days of the Cro-Magnons, who carved the profile of one of their people on a limestone plaque, which was discovered in a cave at La Marche, France. Pliny thought that the first painting was probably a silhouette made by tracing someone’s shadow on the wall; and he may have been right. Throughout history, humans have associated identity with faces—the faces we find on ancient coins, in Ice Age carvings, in death masks, on the shrunken heads of enemies, outlined in ocher on Paleolithic walls, painted in three-quarter view (known as “eye and a half”) on canvas by fifteenth-century Venetians, carved in gems as cameos, etched on copper to make cheap daguerreotypes, collected in photo albums. In his portraits, Leonardo da Vinci strove to reveal what he referred to as “the motions of the mind.”
The word face probably came from the Latin facere, to make or shape, and the Indo-European root dhe-k-, to set or put. The etymology hints at artifice. A face is something we revise to fit the occasion. Or, as T. S. Eliot writes in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” The Oxford English Dictionary records the word face being used first in A.D. 1290, to denote the front part of the head. By the fifteenth century, it could also be used as a verb, meaning to brag. In the English Midlands, I once heard a woman in her eighties refuse a second helping of cake by saying: “Don’t overface me.” We face off, face the music, interface, lose face, do an about-face, face up to, fall flat on our faces, talk face-to-face. We regard the face of the clock or of a building, and remark how the face of the city has changed, and how life may vanish from the face of the earth. On the face of it, we are obsessed with faces.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE FACE
Look at a child less than a year old, and you’ll see a face that’s ancient. Every bone in it can be traced back through the fossil record to a creature that roamed the primitive seas. The human face began 350 million years ago with the Crossopterygii, a lunged fish that was driven by drought or hunger to leave its ocean home and leap into the thinly linked realms of air and water, flopping from pond to pond. As it settled along riverbanks and streams, it evolved strong fins with which to propel itself, a larger brain, better lungs. In time its gills became excess baggage that, along with the gill muscles, evolved into a jaw and the rudest beginnings of a face. Every face we now meet on land, whether it belongs to a pet cat, or our grandmother, or this new child, can trace its ancestry to that one species of fish.
Amphibians evolved much later, then reptiles, and at last mammals, the class to which humans and many land animals belong. As each developed its own needs and habitat, its face changed. At home on the jungle floor, the first mammals hunted insects and had whiskers and long sharp noses. Over a period of thirty million years, they evolved into horses, elephants, whales, and other higher mammals. As discussed earlier, those with widely spaced eyes had a better chance of survival, bore more young, and passed along their vigilance to their offspring. Predators, on the other hand, needed eyes set right in the front of their faces, for good depth perception and stereoscopic vision. One glance at a human face tells all about our origins: we were not the prey but the predator.
When our primate ancestors began living in trees, about sixty-five million years ago, their eyes changed. Swinging from branch to branch required even better depth perception. Color vision made it possible to judge ripening fruit, and to recognize dangerous plants and animals. Their teeth became larger and blunter, good for grinding plants. At first the primate face was almost expressionless, a mask that could only show fear or rage by rolling back the lips and baring the teeth, but in time the eye sockets migrated around to the center of the face, the mouth developed an arching roof, and the lower jaw widened into a sweeping curve. A long caravan of hominids rose and fell, with some lines dying out and others prevailing. Then, two million years ago, a small-bodied, brainy ape appeared, Homo habilis (“handy man”), who made simple tools. A social being, Homo habilis probably had a range of facial expressions. Because Homo habilis switched from a strict vegetarian life to the habits of an omnivore, its teeth changed—a diet of plants requires teeth with large grinding surfaces and strong muscles and jaws to hold them. But meat-eaters can have more delicate faces. Then, about a million years ago, Homo erectus appeared, an upright hominid with small teeth, a big brain, and prominent eyes. After they tamed fire, they not only cooked food (making it easier to chew), they gathered around fires to eat and keep warm, sat and looked at one another face-to-face, engaged in social activities. Cro-Magnon man, the next stage in human evolution, appeared on the scene around 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, with a large forehead that housed a colossal brain, a rounded cranium, a rather delicate jaw, and a tongue, mouth, and larynx capable of speech. The original Cro-Magnons were a relatively small group of people and, as they grew and split up and migrated to different parts of the world, each group adapted to a new environment and passed along unique traits through natural selection. For example, some African blacks developed a gene that protects them against malaria (unfortunately, it also causes sickle-cell anemia); some northern Asians developed stout, squat bodies to prevent heat loss and slitted eyes to keep out glare from the snow; some tribes living in hot, humid regions grew tall, lanky bodies with greater skin area to prevent overheating.
Extrapolating from such evidence, our common sense, our science, and our folk wisdom all tell us that people have evolved different “looks” as a way of adapting to the rigors of their environment. People who live in the tropics are said to need more melanin, a dark brown or black pigment that helps them withstand the brutal onslaught of the tropical sun, which can cause skin cancer. Some scientists even claim that dark skin acts as better camouflage in the jungle, or prevents beryllium poisoning, or helps to maintain the right level of folic acid. Kinky hair is said to protect the head and allow it to perspire more freely. The plump, padded skin on the faces of the Inuit supposedly helps to provide insulation in subzero temperatures. Desert dwellers are said to have large hooked noses that serve to humidify the dry air before it enters the lungs, Scandinavians to have pale skin so that they can absorb more sunlight and vitamin D.
But does this make sense? Living as far north as they do, Inuits should have ultra-pale skin, but they don’t. Although Tasmania receives little light, which should result in fair skin, its peoples have
very dark skin. None of the original inhabitants of the Americas had black skin, even those who lived at the equator. In the Solomon Islands, people with black skin and white skin live on islands close by. Although one sees much blond hair among Scandinavians, one also finds it among Australian aborigines. Blue eyes supposedly see better in the dim light of northern climates, but the peoples of regions with even lower light levels, such as the mist-shrouded mountains of New Guinea, have dark eyes. If we consider skin and eye color in connection with the amount of sunlight received, it becomes clear that no simple correlations can be made. Over a hundred years ago, Charles Darwin said the same thing. In The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, he points out that there are many human traits—especially facial ones—that natural selection cannot explain fully. It is more likely that hair and eye color, shape of lips and eyelids, skin color, amount of facial hair in men, the form of the penis, and the color of a woman’s nipples and shape of her buttocks have nothing to do with adaptation to environment, but, instead, have evolved through “sexual selection.” According to this line of reasoning, only the sexiest survive. People choose mates they find attractive, and we find people most attractive if they look like us. This may be because children imprint on the people they see around them—especially their parents and siblings, the people they see most. So, fair-skinned, brown-eyed brunets, who grew up in a family of people who looked the same, would find fair-skinned, brown-eyed brunets beautiful and be attracted to them as mates. This narcissism could work on quite a large scale: in a group of curly haired people, people with straight hair would have fewer mates and fewer offspring. In time, the gene for straight hair would either die out or the curly-haired people would tend to mate with their own kind and the straight-haired people with theirs, thus forming distinct groups and creating separate gene pools.
SURVIVAL OF THE CUTEST
Small children naturally develop plump, bulging cheeks, a large forehead, big eyes, a small round chin, and, often, dimples. Just looking at them makes the heart melt, and studies strongly suggest that such a response is biologically based. Cuter babies are handled more, and smile more often, which elicits even more smiles and affectionate touching from adults. Cuteness triggers a protective response in both adults and children. Studies show that when adults retain these childlike features, they’re also thought to have attractive personalities. As researchers Diane S. Berry and Leslie Zebrowitz-McArthur report: “People with an infantile craniofacial profile, low vertical placement of features, a small, and rounded chin, large round eyes, high eyebrows, smooth skin, or a short nose are perceived as warmer and more submissive, weaker, more naïve, and less threatening than those with more mature versions of the same features.” This may help to explain society’s double standard of beauty when it comes to aging. People who are shown photographs of men and women choose younger women but older men as the most attractive. As Konrad Lorenz first argued, this is because men are attracted to women in their childbearing years, knowing that they will be healthy enough to bear children and raise them; whereas women are attracted to men who have the status and power to protect those children.*
What physical features of a woman’s face do we find attractive? Society reads childlike, even infantile, facial features as “cute.” Women tend to retain those features as adults, and that works well at first. In order to find a woman attractive, we need to see her as feminine, and a key ingredient of femininity is being a little childlike in appearance. Unfortunately for a woman, those facial features change as she grows older. So aging hits women harder than men, because older women can sometimes seem less feminine-looking to us, while older men tend to grow more masculine-looking as they age. This contributes heavily to the double standard of beauty we find so unjust.
Fortunately, beauty’s power isn’t absolute in every case. The equation of looks and personality runs in both directions: we credit attractive people with being superior in other ways; but we also credit good/talented/superior people with being more attractive. Consider the sometimes dissonant features of many famous and talented actors and actresses thought to be beautiful—Marlene Dietrich, for example. She was a beautiful woman, with an angular face and quite sunken cheeks. To achieve that caved-in look, she had her upper rear molars removed when she was a young starlet. To look wide-eyed and innocent, she plucked her eyebrows into very high, thin, rounded arches that made her look as if she were always on the verge of asking a question.
When one is in the throes of an affair, it’s easy to believe one’s lover an Adonis. Then, years later, bumping into the same man in a bookshop, you may think: I never noticed how short he was, or Did he always have that broken capillary in his eye? Anaïs Nin describes beauty’s fickle current in her notebooks. When a gorgeous woman strolls by, she’s instantly smitten, but then she discovers the woman’s inner face, and that completely changes how she perceives the outer one:
As June walked towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the door, I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. A startlingly white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes. Years ago I tried to imagine a true beauty; I created in my mind an image of just such a woman. I had never seen her until last night. Yet I knew long ago the phosphorescent color of her skin, her huntress profile, the evenness of her teeth. She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat before her, I felt I would do anything she asked of me…. By the end of the evening I had extricated myself from her power. She killed my admiration by her talk. Her talk. The enormous ego, false, weak, posturing …
FACING OUR BIASES
As both Dietrich and Nin understood, we often judge someone’s character by their looks. Attractive criminals receive lighter jail sentences; suspects with ugly or coarse features have a harder time proving their innocence, and are dealt with more harshly if they’re guilty. And if people look alike, we suspect they may act alike. Prompted by these simple truths of human nature, Galen, Hippocrates, and many other ancient doctors believed in physiognomy, the practice of deciphering a person’s character and condition from his face. Formal treatises on face-reading abound in medical literature, from the Greeks to the Chinese. Aristotle claimed that if a person looked at all like an animal he shared that animal’s essential nature. Someone with a beaky nose and angular face would be eaglelike—bold, brave, and egotistical. Someone with a horsey face would be loyal and proud. A broad face indicated stupidity, a small face trustworthiness, and so on. In medieval Europe, astrologers read faces as well as the stars. The Elizabethans believed that eye color revealed one’s character. Honest people had blue eyes, ne’er-do-wells had medium brown, the innately jealous had green, people of mystery had the darkest brown, and those with loose morals had blue eyes ringed in a slightly darker blue. In his “Moral Diseases of the Eye,” Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister, went so far as to correlate virtue with health of the eyes. Someone with inflamed eyes was proclaiming how “unchaste” they were, a truth that must have been especially disillusioning during allergy season. If a person squinted, it proved they had a base nature, a myopia of the soul. Along with face-reading, phrenology arose, the art of reading the shape of the head and any bumps it might have. In time it became so fashionable that instead of telling someone “You need to get in touch with your feelings,” the usual line was “You need to have your head examined!” Although, intellectually, we may dismiss such customs as claptrap, to some extent we do judge people by their faces. So it’s no surprise that reconstructive surgery is an ancient practice.* Or that a beautiful face is enough to start the engines of love.
*“Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” Christopher Marlowe asked. A joke making the rounds is that scientists now have quantified beauty into units called “helens.” A millihelen is just enough beauty to launch one ship.
*Interesting local theory: Irene, who runs Isado
ra’s, a lingerie shop in my town, tells me that she’s noticed something curious among her male clientele. Unlike the women, they respond voluptuously to the feel of the softest fabrics. They spend a long time choosing just the right nightdress or slip, but once they touch something that’s silky and soft they buy it, regardless of price. She thinks this may be because men have evolved to relish the softest-fleshed women, the young fertile ones, and thus instinctively respond to skin-soft frillies.
*The fifteen-hundred-year-old Sanskrit Rig Veda speaks of nose repair, and the Egyptian Papyrus Ebers offers instructions for repairing noses, ears, and other parts disfigured by war or accident.
THE HAIR
When lovers describe their sweethearts, they usually mention the color and length of their hair. One may love the whole person, body and spirit, but hair becomes the fetish of that love. Yielding and soft, sumptuous and colorful, decorative and dangling, it invites a lover’s touch. It’s fun to fondle, play with, and disarrange. Messing it up is the symbolic equivalent of undressing the other’s body. A woman quickly learns that cutting her hair without warning her lover first is a bad mistake. Even a becoming change of hairstyle can be shocking and disturbing.
A boyfriend, on the verge of breaking up with me, once exclaimed with a wince, “Your hair!” “What’s wrong with it?” I asked, suddenly vulnerable as a trembling fawn. “Well, there’s just so much of it…” he said. I knew then that everything was over between us. Hair is the caressable plumage of love, a feature individual as the shape of one’s chin or the size of one’s fingers. If he had said: “I no longer like your mouth,” it wouldn’t have been more wounding. I once tucked a perfect curl of my hair, tied with a lavender ribbon, between the pages of a poetry book I was returning to a friend. The curl marked my favorite love poem, and I felt as if I were charging the book with my life force. I knew I was giving him a powerful talisman. Hair is sacred to lovers, but also to society.