Face

Berenice and Blackbeard
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
A treasure frames the upper face: the hair. Some 100,000 strands adorn the head and they give the face a silken backdrop. It is as if the face exists within a fine-grained lushness, beyond ken and faintly fragrant with desire.

Within the Helix
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
In 1731 a Spanish sailor, defending his nation's trading rights in Cuba, boarded an English brig and sliced off the ear of Captain Robert Jenkins. This impertinence outraged the captain, though it didn't alter his appearance, since he wore a wig like most

The Lively Hinterland
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
In Paysage de Baucis (1966), René Magritte depicts himself as a mere nose, mouth, and eyes beneath a bowler hat. These features float in vacant air, without musculature, bones, or outline.

An Anatomy of Kissing
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
A kiss is not just a kiss. Indeed, it is a medium more than a single message. The Romans noted three kisses: of friendship (oscula), love (basia), and passion (suavia). The Talmudic rabbis identified a more formal trio: kisses of greeting, leavetaking

The Primeval Feature
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
If we view the face as a geography, it is two long forests, a pair of multicolored sunken lakes, a Gibraltar-like peak, and an abyssal pit. The pit is the most dramatic item on the map, and it is of course the mouth.

Sphinx
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
An obvious fact is as plain as the nose on your face. Yet aside from its blatant existence, few things are plain about the nose. It is esthetically deceptive, symbolically bipolar, physically protean, and even semi-secessionist.

Cutting Room of the Mind
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
Even the busiest attorney or executive loses about twenty-three minutes in every waking day. They simply vanish and we are oblivious to it, as if spellbound. The time trickles away in 14,000 tiny gaps, which the brain edits out of our perception.

Double Star
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
O! What a life is the eye! what a strange and inscrutable essence! wrote Coleridge. Indeed, the eyes are far more than tools of sight, and we have just begun penetrating their glittery mysteries. Nothing else shows thought like the eyes.

The Great Resculpting
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
Few ideas jarred the nineteenth century quite like natural selection. Many thinkers felt an ape ancestry was impossible, even insulting, given our broad minds and deep souls.

Why Have a Hairless Face?
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
We treasure smooth facial skin and can respond very badly to interruptions in it like acne and wrinkles. A particular grotesquerie is hair all over the face, the rare werewolf syndrome. Yet hair coats the faces of most mammals.

Why have a face?
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
We don't strictly need one. Many creatures, like sea urchins, starfish, clams, jellyfish, and protozoa, disdain it entirely. Others have partial faces. The microscopic rotifer has a pair of eye-spots on a rod in a feeding cup, an almost faceless face.

A Tour of Unknown Parts
The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill
From the Sphinx to Mona Lisa, from strangers in a crowd to the people we love, the face beguiles us. It is our social signature, our passport into the hearts and minds of those around us, and provides a constant flow of richly complex information.