As covered in the page on zones, the human being carries signs of zonal influence. The art of face reading has surfaced in many cultures. The most recent proponent of it was the Swiss Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) who awoke interest in it in the West.

    After Lavater's book, Essays in Physiognomy, was published in 1772, people took to wearing masks in the street. A wave of interest also swept through North America for thirty or forty years around 1900.

    In time, phrenology, the practice of reading the bumps on the head, made many insupportable claims for itself, and became discredited, taking face reading down with it. Echoes still remain. Morphopsychology, as it has been called in Europe, continues to be studied in France (www.morphopsy.org).

    It's still a useful art. Before being dismissed as improbable, face reading should be considered in terms of the zones. Being driven by the impulse to grow upwards towards the sun, source of all light, the human body sits in the same three broad zones in its construction as do plants and the spatial layout of the horizon. Within that overall layout, subsets can be found, and the human face is one of them.

    Here are the principles. Muscle is more powerful than bone. As the brain, running all operations, becomes accustomed to producing the same emotions and impulses according to a person’s customary attitudes, the same expressions are used again and again. In time, this constant tugging on the bone creates shifts in the way it grows, making for permanent facial features.

    In addition to the trace left by the muscles on the features, there are other elements appearing in the facial construction that are more inherent responses from the innate personality and less about habituation. For example, in the natural world, a wide head (creating a broad base for the jaw) is a sign of the ability to fight by biting and twisting. A narrow jaw could easily be unhinged in the violence of fighting. If we follow this through nature, we find the narrow-headed animals tend to be the peace-loving grass-eaters and pack animals – think of the antelope. They protect themselves by flight. The wide-headed animals tend to be the predators. Think of the cat family.

    In this way, facial shapes follow along from existing natural tendencies. There are classic shapes to the human face between narrow and wide, and to some extent certain personality characteristics will follow this principle. It goes on from there through other facial features. The lips, for instance, are the outward manifestation of a person’s sense of taste, which in turn represents the appetites. Just as there’s a wide variation in the emphases people place on their appetites, so there’s a similar variability in the formation of lips – small, large, strongly coloured, lightly coloured, protruding, receding. An observant person can draw consistent and accurate conclusions about personality style from reading the signs.

    As usual, on the face of all creatures that walk the earth, as in a lot else, there’s a trace in space.   

    Face Reading – the Forgotten Art of Instant Character Analysis by Peter J Allen (ISBN 0 646 13959 2, first published 1993, currently out of print) is a 174-page illustrated book on the subject.