Navigating a sea of faces

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33869, 14 June 1975, Page 10

Navigating a sea of faces

The Human Face. By John Liggett Constable. 282 pp. Index. N.Z price $9.55.

Sir Thomas Browne observed: “It is the common wonder of all men how among so many millions of faces, there should be none alike.” .In Seventeenth century England at the same time an Act was promulgated which declared' that “all persons fayning to have knowledge of Phisiognomie or like Fantasticall Ymaginacions” were liable to be “stripped from the middle upwards and openly whipped.”

Faces have always fascinated men. not least, because they are the readiest means of identifying individuals and a constant source of information about people's emotions and intentions. Many theories of a “science of faces” have been attempted; most find a place in this profusely illustrated book. Then the author, an academic psychologist, sets out to begin to establish a new version of the science (or art) of “Phisiognomie.” He is entertaining and instructive at many levels. This is an admirable bedside book which ranges widely over the history of cosmetics, the muscular activity of telling lies, the plastic surgery of pop singers, and thd character sketches of Leonardo da Vinci. Mr. Liggett even manages an appropriate defintion from Ambrose Bierce: "Admiration — our polite recognition of another man's resemblance to ourselves.”

Mr Liggett ends with a plea for scepticism about, the reading of faces, although his own account enhances, rather than diminishes, the fascination of the face. “It is to the face we look for clues about character,”, he writes, but “our impressions, our judgments, and inevitably therefore our social behaviour are all too often determined by aspects of the human face which are trivial.”

Instead, he promises before long a new technology which will “pronounce with certainty on the relationship of face and character.” Perhaps those, who find their faces are too revealing will once again have to go masked in public.

Some of the materials for further study of faces are scattered through this book; many more are all around us every day. After reading Mr Liggett, human faces, wherever seen, will never be quite the same again.

Like the author, readers should find a new delight in sitting in pubs or or buses “lost in wonder” at the face; around them.