Our faces are us. They indicate who and what we are. Observers can tell, with a fair degree of reliability, our sex, age, colour, perhaps ethnicity and socio-economic status, character (although not so reliably), and health, and they can even guess our politics.

And faces are the prime symbols of the self. We keep the faces of our loved ones in our wallets, and their pictures adorn our rooms. It is our faces that decorate our passports and identification papers. It is the faces of criminals on the FBI Most Wanted lists, and of students in the yearbooks, and of politicians, athletes, and celebrities in our newspapers and magazines. (Yet the face is also “made up” and “put on.”)

Faces are also the prime sites of emotional expression. We scrutinize each others' faces as we talk to monitor their reactions: Do they agree? Disagree? Understand? Is she telling the truth? How does he feel about this? Face-reading is an important part of the art of conversation and communication.

Similarly, we monitor our own faces, careful to present ourselves as we wish to be perceived, and perhaps as we wish to deceive. (Lady Macbeth: “Your face, my thane, is as a book, where men / May read strange matters. To beguile the time / Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t.”) Communication is not simply a matter of face-reading, of course, but also of verbal language, body language, tone of voice, pauses, and more; but our faces are often more important than our words, especially in the conveying of emotional intensity.

The face is also the locus of all of our senses, though the sense of touch is located all over our skin, and with about 80 mimetic muscles, it is capable of an immense range of expressions.

The face, then, is the self, a symbol of the self, the site of emotional expression, a medium of communication, and how we recognize each other.

Or not. In his best-seller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks describes how he was examining a man for his vision. After it was over, the man “started to look around for his hat. He reached out his hand and took hold of his wife’s head, tried to lift it off, to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat” (1987: 11). He had a brain tumour. But the story illustrates the role of facial recognition in social interaction. Another person, horrifyingly, could not recognize his own face in the mirror (1987:21). This can be problematic for those who have face transplants.

How important the face is for self-esteem and social life is indicated by both the number and the expense of surgical procedures on the face. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons noted in its 2023 Report with the 2020 statistics (all down since 2019 due to the pandemic) that the top three surgical procedures were performed on noses (353,000), eyelids (325,000), and faces (facelifts, at 234,000), totaling almost half of the total 2 million surgeries. More were performed on cheeks, chins, ears, foreheads, and lips, as well as dermabrasion. The total cost of all these facial surgeries was about $6.6 billion, but including the minimally invasive procedures, mostly botox and fillers, the total cost of cosmetic procedures was $16.7 billion. Such an investment in time, pain, and money clarifies the economic and psychological significance of the face.

The Face Mystique

The face chimes with beauty in that both mean so much more than appearance. They reflect the old medieval doctrine of correspondence that all is related: The body reflects the soul, the outer reflects the inner, the physical and the metaphysical correspond, and the microcosm with the macrocosm. (Tillyard, 1972) Both beauty and the face are classic examples still—hence, the investment, both economic and psychological.

Physiognomics dates back to Aristotle and later was complemented by metoposcopy, divinization by the wrinkles, moles, warts, and lines on the face, together with palmistry, astrology, the Zodiac, and horoscopes. Today these facial matters are mostly only of historical interest; the primary interests now are beauty, but also CCTV and facial recognition technology, and the conflicts between surveillance rights and privacy rights.

This belief is ancient. St. Jerome (345–420) expressed this mystique clearly: “The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart." Proverbs deny these equations, wisely: “Beauty is only skin deep.” “All that glitters is not gold.” “Appearances are deceptive.” "Handsome is as handsome does.” “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” But, of course, we always do judge by appearances. At first, that is all we have to go by. Attractiveness attracts. Ugliness repels.

Nonetheless, the mystiques persisted, in Castiglione, Dante, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, and others. Hegel expressed this eloquently: “The face has a…centre in which the soulful and spiritual relation to things is manifested.” He continued to the effect that the face itself is manifested in the glance: A man’s “glance is what is most full of his soul, the concentration of his inmost personality and feeling." So is a woman’s glance, presumably.

In his essay “On Physiognomy,” Schopenhauer echoed Hegel: “That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face a revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go by.” He added, more enthusiastically: “The face of a man is the exact expression of what he is.”

The German sociologist Georg Simmel echoed Hegel, writing in a 1901 essay: “In the features of the face the soul finds its clearest expression,” adding that “the face strikes us as the symbol, not only of the spirit, but also of an unmistakable personality."

The beautiful face expresses the beautiful soul; the converse is also thought to be true: Ugly is evil, and evil is ugly. We say “You look divine!” or “You look like hell!”, polarizing the physical and conflating the physical and the moral in the mystiques of correspondence.

“’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” rhapsodised Keats. Prosaically, not true. Beautiful people may lie, and the truth may be ugly. But it sounds good.

Two further brief points: The art or science of physiognomics persisted to Johann Lavater’s illustrated Essays on Physiognomy (1775) up to Simmel and into the 1970s and 1980s with a range of titles. (For more on the face, see Synnott, 1993.)

Secondly, this psychological and economic investment in the face may pay dividends in both romance and economics. As Darwin pointed out in The Descent of Man, attractive females (and males) have a wider choice of partners, which explains their various beautification arts. Since the pioneering research of Janusz Kaczorowski (1989) on the economic benefits of physical attractiveness and Berscheid and Walster (1972) on the psychological benefits, an explosion of work has demonstrated the validity of the face mystique, despite the proverbs. Kara-Yakoubian (2022) summarized the positive consequences: “…greater happiness, higher wages, better jobs, and even higher cognitive outcomes.” Evidently that $16.7 billion investment in beauty and goodness may be worthwhile.