Face Value

1. There are seven types of face shapes: oval, round, square, diamond, heart, pear, and oblong. You can stare into a mirror until your eyes have different zip codes and your lips slope at a 45 degree angle. You still won’t be able to determine if your parents gave you a fruit or a gemstone for a head.

2. I wear my father’s dark eyes on my mother’s angled face. My brothers got all the eyelashes and they don’t even need them.

3. War. Blackjack. Egyptian Ratscrew. Blitz. Poker. You want the face cards in your hand.

4. There was only one girl in my third grade class who could accomplish the dual Herculean feats of having an iPhone and keeping said iPhone hidden from our teacher. One time, when we crowded her at recess, she showed us a new website she had discovered: prettyscale.com. The page read “Am I Beautiful or Ugly? Am I pretty? Am I ugly? Why am I ugly? or not pretty enough? Online test for face-beauty analysis.” The website used “complex mathematical calculations” to rate faces from 1 to 100. She could upload pictures of our faces for us, if we wanted. One girl agreed, but the rest of us were too intimidated to partake after seeing her results.

5. The social network is a book of faces.

6. When I was in fourth grade, two of my classmates got into a fight over a girl. The first one started punching and the second one started screaming “Not the face! Not the face!”

7. To fall flat on your face is to make a huge mistake. To have something blow up in your face is to make an even huger mistake.

8. My roommate loses her jacket and claims it vanished from the face of the earth. What part of the earth’s face are we on? Are we slipping across the surface of the eyes or clinging to hairs in the nostrils? Are we sun-kissed freckles or an angry rash? How would prettyscale.com rate this face?

9. If you squint hard enough at night, you can see a face in the moon, too. In Hebrew mythology, this is the face of a man who was banished to the moon as a punishment for collecting sticks on the rest day of the Sabbath. Germans think he stole a hedge, while Romans think he stole a sheep. In a Vietnamese mythology, the man in the moon, Cuội, grabbed onto a flying tree and was whisked all the way to the moon. If I had to guess which of the seven face shapes he has, my money would be on round.

10. To face something is to confront it. It’s head-on. Do it. Go into the woods alone and face your demons. If you guys want to work this out, do it face-to-face. 

11. It’s also acceptance. Deal with it. Let’s face it: he no longer loves you. Just face the fact that you’re not going to win this race.

12. “Face the music” was originally a theatrical term. Orchestras are often located in front of the stage; directors gave actors this direction to encourage them to look forwards, despite their stage fright. 

13. To save face is to retain respect, to avoid humiliation. To yell “in your face!” is to disrespect and humiliate another person.

14. Facial pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing faces in everyday objects. It used to be considered a symptom of psychosis, but now scientists think it gave us an evolutionary advantage.

15. The sloping side of a mountain is called the face. In the Northern hemisphere, the north face of a mountain gets the least amount of sunlight, meaning they have the most snow and thus the most ideal conditions for skiers. For climbers, the north face is typically the scariest, iciest, and most badass route. 

16. Every lacrosse game begins with a face-off. The referee places a ball between two midfielders’ baskets and they exert enough opposing force to keep the ball in place until the whistle blows. You can watch the ball, or you can stare down your opponent through the bars of your goggles. Game face.

17. “Have you seen whatsherface anywhere?” This one seems derogatory.

18. There’s no place like a women’s bathroom at a college bar, and there are no people like drunk girls staring at their faces in the mirror. Eyes with smudged liner and lips frowning at the text sent to an ex-boyfriend. Eyes that light up when they compliment your shirt and lips that leave red stains on your cheek.

19. My uncle once told me I have a great face for radio. I told him he had a great voice for newspaper.

20. “I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that” - Lauren Bacall.

21. When I was four years old, I fell head first off my tricycle, slamming the side of my face into concrete and permanently altering the trajectory of my front teeth. The only way out was three years of braces. When I got mine on, I was worried the kids at my new school would call me “brace-face.” Thankfully, the only person to use this term regularly was my mom.

22. An actual exchange I witnessed: 

Person A: “I wish we could use emojis in real life.” 

Person B: “Do you not have a face?”

23. FaceTime is a strangely-named app. It reminds me of “tummy time,” a colloquialism for putting babies in the prone position to encourage neck development. 

24. I don’t know much about astrology, but my sign is Gemini. Geminis are considered dishonest and calculating. Also curious and communicative. Twins. Flipping on a whim. Two sides of a coin. Two-faced.

25. To face a blunt is to smoke it all by yourself.

26. When I am red in the face, I am emotional, overheated, or sunburnt. When I am blue in the face, I am exhausted, choking, or swimming in a lake in May. When I am orange in the face, I have poorly applied a spray tan.

27. A powerful, disappointing insult is a slap in the face.

28. Tess Christian, nicknamed “Mona Lisa,” is a British woman who has gone without smiling for 40 years in an attempt to forestall wrinkles. She learned how to hold her facial muscles rigid whenever she was tempted to laugh and claims that she felt more elegant when she held a somber expression. I wonder how many people have made jokes to her and thought they landed flat.

29. I wonder what prettyscale.com would have to say about Tess Christian’s face.

30. I want smile lines when I am older. I want to look like my parents, even though my mom hides the gap in her teeth and my dad lies about his height.