Sphinx

The Face: A Natural History
By Daniel McNeill

(Page 7 of 12)

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. It has lodged right in the middle of the face, and there it flings riddles at us.

What kind of nose is most attractive? In Little Women, Amy feels her flat nose has been the great misfortune of her life and puts a clothespin on it to try to extend it. In Rabelais, Friar John says firm breasts in wet-nurses halt nasal growth and give children ugly snubs. Renaissance theorist of beauty Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1543) deemed a turned-up nose unsightly, and Malinowski reports the Trobriand Islanders felt a flat nose was unattractive and limited the potential for romance.

But others idealize the retroussé ("turned up") nose. Thackeray gave Becky Sharp a snub. Dickens attributed criticism of it to envy, and Marilyn Monroe practiced holding her upper lip down when she smiled, to make her nose seem smaller.

Scientists have now resolved this strange controversy: Men overwhelmingly prefer a small nose in women. Indeed, when cartoonists omit the nose of a pretty woman, men fill in with a snub.

The nose is a paradox in psychoanalysis. Freudians classically deem it a symbol of the male sex organs, and in the Slawkenbergius tale in Tristram Shandy a horseman visits the Promontory of Noses and gets a near-obscene one. Yet psychoanalysts also say the nose emblemizes the female genitals, though not as frequently. It is both protrusion and opening.

The nose has bemused anatomists. Even today, they give varying names to the same muscles and cartilages, draw its muscles differently in established textbooks, and disagree about whether one muscle, M. nasalis, widens or shrinks the nostril.

No part of the facial flesh feels as autonomous as the nose, and novelists have played extravagantly on this sense. In the Slawkenbergius tale, the horseman replaces his nose as casually as if it were spectacles. Judge Whimplewopper in Ishmael Reed's The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) has a nose so long he has to rest it on a purple satin pillow. Fans of it throng the corridors outside court and seek the nose's opinions. In The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), a nose tattles on its owner. The device occupies just one percent of the book, yet it resonates, capturing our fear that, when we lie, our faces may betray us.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) brought noses to full-fledged life. In "The Diary of a Madman," the title character says noses have built a civilization on the lunar surface. "That's why we can't see our own noses: they are all on the moon." Platon Kovalyov's proboscis in "The Nose" (1834) is the most interesting specimen in literature. When a barber slices it off, it gains freedom and carves out a career for itself in St. Petersburg. Kovalyov spots it in a gold-braided uniform and begs an audience. It is proud, in the way of noses, and dismisses him curtly.

Indeed, a hubris attaches to the nose. An arrogant person has "his nose in the air" or "turns his nose up." In Japanese, hanataka, "high nose," means "proud." The obsolete term "nose-wise" meant "clever, in one's own opinion." Samuel Johnson defined "to nose" as "to look big, to bluster." We "thumb our noses" at others, putting a thumb on the nose and wiggling the extended fingers in derision. Pride's link to the nose reflects a biological fact: We wrinkle it automatically to show disgust.

Yet the nose can also signal humility. It can be passive, a kind of handle-not a sign of respect for its owner. We can tweak a person's nose, or pull it. A "nose of wax" is a weak person, easily manipulated. The Serbo-Croatian phrase vuci za nosa, literally "to drag by the nose," means "to make a fool of." In Gogol's "The Quarrel of the Two Ivans," a woman grabs Ivan Nikiforovich's nose and leads him around like a poodle. "Is that all our noses are good for?" the author laments.

The nose is the most variable part of the face. It can be snub, ski-slope, bulbous, bent like a boomerang. It can be aquiline ("curved like an eagle's beak"), straight, Roman ("having a prominent, slightly aquiline bridge"). The classic "English" nose, like Henry VIII's, is straight with a delicate camber. The nose can be flat and wide, or splayed out and close to the skin. It can be long, high, and narrow, like a blade.*

Comedians like Jimmy "The Schnozz" Durante and Phyllis Diller gained fame with their noses. In The Bank Dick, a little boy points at W. C. Fields and laughs, "Look at the man's funny nose!" His mother scolds him: "Mustn't make fun of the man's nose, dear. You'd like to have a nose that big full of nickels, wouldn't you?"

Fields suffered from rosacea, a peculiar disease that makes the nose a scarlet flare. It exaggerates the normal flushing of the face and ultimately swells the capillaries, causing constant redness. The extra blood can make the skin overgrow and dot the nose with ugly pustules. Alcohol flushes the face and worsens the ailment, which came to be known as "drinker's nose" or "grog blossoms." J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), another famous victim, offered $100,000 to anyone discovering its cause. Scientists have yet to collect, though they have linked it to the wicked-looking mite Demodex follicularum, and one new theory points to Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that causes ulcers. Some physicians believe Bill Clinton has rosacea.

Sun also reddens the nose, and faster than any other part of the face. Because the nose protrudes, ultraviolet rays can strike it from almost any angle, especially the side, while the forehead and other surfaces gain respite. Like a salient in a battlefront, the nose takes more bombardment.

Probably no literary figure has described the nose more stirringly than Cyrano de Bergerac. Dramatist Edmond Rostand (1868-1918) once wrote billets doux for a friend in school, though apparently not to a woman he loved. Yet he clearly had a sense for Cyrano's plight. "A large nose is the sign manifest of such a man as I am-courteous, witty, liberal in opinions, fired with courage," says Cyrano at one moment, and at the next he bemoans his nose as a curse. Any extreme facial feature can harm looks, but the nose is especially hazardous. Oddly, Cyrano, for all his brilliance, missed the one insight that could have saved him: Roxane didn't care about his nose.

Why do noses jut out at all? Coleridge suggested it was so people could take snuff. The nose puzzled Firenzuola, who listed uses for it-breathing, smelling, and purging-then shrugged and said it seemed mainly an ornament.

In fact, our facial prow is zoologically bizarre. Galapagos tortoises have just two holes in their heads, and they are typical. The nares of fish and lizards don't project. Neither do those of gorillas or chimps. Among living primates, only the proboscis monkey has a protruding nose.

Perhaps it is an odor canopy. Since we are vertical and flat-faced, the nose may gather aromas rising from below, so we can better assay food. We mainly sniff viands-unlike most animals, we rarely use scent for prey, social signals, or other items at a distance-so mouth-facing nostrils may make evolutionary sense. On the other hand, we don't know how much good this configuration actually does, and it first appeared on the slope-faced Homo habilis, where it would have done less.

Maybe it began as an anteroom for breath. It certainly serves this function today. As air passes up the nostrils, it picks up heat and moisture from the mucous membranes, so it won't chill or dry the lungs. Hence tropical peoples have smaller noses than arctic ones, and the cold-dwelling Neanderthals possessed gigantic noses. However, almost every warm-blooded animal performs this task inside the head, in convoluted passages called turbinals. We have turbinals too, and the question here is why they should have partly migrated outside the skull, where they are more vulnerable.*

Could the nose be just a lowly servant of the eye? That's the theory of psychologist T. G. R. Bower, who observes that every animal with panoramic vision has some projection of itself that interrupts its view. For instance, chimps have muzzles, dogs have snouts, and the owl has a nasal tuft that covers 30 degrees of its visual field. Bower argues that human eyes compare the world against the nose. The nose is always visible, so it helps us position objects and tell whether they or we are moving. This idea is so delectable it's hard not to root for it.

In 1960 biologist Alistair Hardy suggested an even more radical notion, one writer Elaine Morgan has since expanded on. It has become one of the most ridiculed and interesting ideas in prehuman anthropology: the aquatic-ape theory. It holds that we spent some recent evolutionary time partly in water, perhaps to elude lions and other carnivores. During this period our bodies changed. We lost most of our body hair, since it no longer kept us warm, and instead developed a fat layer under our skin, like dolphins, seals, and other marine animals.

Water altered us in many other ways, the theory contends. For instance, it reduced our sense of smell, and indeed among mammals only dolphins and whales have worse olfaction than we do. The following table, taken from Morgan, compares features in apes, people, and aquatic species, such as hippos, dolphins, and penguins. (A Yes in the latter column indicates that several animals share the trait.)

What good is a projecting nose to a water-dweller? Many primates are good swimmers, but the champ is the proboscis monkey (Nasalis larvatus) of Borneo. The proboscis swims underwater and dives from 50 feet, higher than any Olympic platform. It has a fantastic nose, a sock of flesh that in males actually overhangs the mouth. This nose protects the monkey's nasal cavity from headlong rushes of water. So does ours. At the beach it deflects waves, and when we swim it diverts the slipstream flowing past. If we were noseless like gorillas, we would constantly face the surprise of water-choked turbinals.

The aquatic-ape theory has surface appeal, yet so far most scientists have ignored it. It is hard to see how some human

Apes Humans Aquatic

Prominent nose No Yes Yes

Sparse body hair No Yes Yes

Streamlined body hair No Yes Yes

Subcutaneous fat No Yes Yes

Tears No Yes Yes

Baby's weight heavy compared to mother's No Yes Yes

Midwives No Yes Yes

Sense of smell Good Poor None

Diving reflex No Yes Yes

Automatic swimming in babies No? Yes Yes

High brain-body ratio No Yes Yes

Conditionable vocalization No Yes Yes

features, like babies' ability to survive for an hour underwater, could have arisen without a watery environment. Yet until this theory survives an enfilade of scientific criticism, its merit will remain unclear.

The structure beneath the nose has a more obvious role.

© 1998 by Daniel McNeill

About the Author

Daniel McNeill is a bestselling author and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Face. Mr. McNeill is the principal author of Fuzzy Logic, which won the 1992-93 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. He has written numerous other books and articles on high technology, and his work has also appeared in fiction, travel, history, law, and education publications. He lives in Southern California.