Face

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For other uses, see Face (disambiguation).

"Faces" and "Human face" redirect here. For the 2001 BBC television miniseries, see The Human
Face. For other uses, see Faces (disambiguation).

Face

Ventrolateral aspect of the face with skin removed,

showing muscles of the face.

Details

Identifiers

Latin Facies, facia

MeSH D005145

TA A01.1.00.006

FMA 24728

Anatomical terminology

[edit on Wikidata]

The face is the front of an animal's head that features three of the head's sense organs, the
eyes, nose, and mouth, and through which animals express many of their emotions.[1][2] The
face is crucial for human identity, and damage such as scarring or developmental deformities
affects the psyche adversely.[1]

Contents
 1 Structure
o 1.1 Shape
 2 Function
o 2.1 Emotion
o 2.2 Perception and recognition of faces
 2.2.1 Biological perspective
 3 Society and culture
o 3.1 Facial surgery
o 3.2 Caricatures
o 3.3 Metaphor
 4 See also
 5 References

Structure
The front of the human head is called the face. It includes several distinct areas,[3] of which
the main features are:

 The forehead, comprising the skin beneath the hairline, bordered laterally by the temples
and inferiorly by eyebrows and ears
 The eyes, sitting in the orbit and protected by eyelids and eyelashes
 The distinctive human nose shape, nostrils, and nasal septum
 The cheeks, covering the maxilla and mandibula (or jaw), the extremity of which is the chin
 The mouth, with the upper lip divided by the philtrum, sometimes revealing the teeth

Facial appearance is vital for human recognition and communication. Facial muscles in
humans allow expression of emotions.

The face is itself a highly sensitive region of the human body and its expression may change
when the brain is stimulated by any of the many human senses, such as touch, temperature,
smell, taste, hearing, movement, hunger, or visual stimuli.[4]

Shape
The nasal cartilages are important in defining the shape of the nose.

The muscles of the face are important when engaging in facial expressions.

Skeletal anatomy of the face

The face is the feature which best distinguishes a person. Specialized regions of the human
brain, such as the fusiform face area (FFA), enable facial recognition; when these are
damaged, it may be impossible to recognize faces even of intimate family members. The
pattern of specific organs, such as the eyes, or of parts of them, is used in biometric
identification to uniquely identify individuals.

The shape of the face is influenced by the bone-structure of the skull, and each face is unique
through the anatomical variation present in the bones of the viscerocranium (and
neurocranium).[1] The bones involved in shaping the face are mainly the maxilla, mandible,
nasal bone and zygomatic bone. Also important are various soft tissues, such as fat, hair and
skin (of which color may vary).[1]

The face changes over time, and features common in children or babies, such as prominent
buccal fat-pads disappear over time, their role in the infant being to stabilize the cheeks
during suckling. While the buccal fat-pads often diminish in size, the prominence of bones
increase with age as they grow and develop.[1]

Facial shape is an important determinant of beauty, particularly facial symmetry.

Human face development, by Haeckel

Various face profiles as caricatures, by William Hogarth

A man's face
A woman's face

Function
Emotion

Faces are essential to expressing emotion, consciously or unconsciously. A frown denotes

disapproval; a smile usually means someone is pleased. Being able to read emotion in
another's face is "the fundamental basis for empathy and the ability to interpret a person’s
reactions and predict the probability of ensuing behaviors". One study used the Multimodal
Emotion Recognition Test[5] to attempt to determine how to measure emotion. This research
aimed at using a measuring device to accomplish what people do so easily everyday: read
emotion in a face.[6]

The muscles of the face play a prominent role in the expression of emotion,[1] and vary among
different individuals, giving rise to additional diversity in expression and facial features.[7]
Variations of the risorius, triangularis and zygomaticus muscles.

People are also relatively good at determining if a smile is real or fake. A recent study looked
at individuals judging forced and genuine smiles. While young and elderly participants
equally could tell the difference for smiling young people, the "older adult participants
outperformed young adult participants in distinguishing between posed and spontaneous
smiles".[8] This suggests that with experience and age, we become more accurate at perceiving
true emotions across various age groups.

Perception and recognition of faces

Main article: Face perception

The face perception mechanisms of the brain, such as the fusiform face area, can produce facial
pareidolias such as this famous rock formation on Mars

Gestalt psychologists theorize that a face is not merely a set of facial features, but is rather
something meaningful in its form. This is consistent with the Gestalt theory that an image is
seen in its entirety, not by its individual parts. According to Gary L. Allen, people adapted to
respond more to faces during evolution as the natural result of being a social species. Allen
suggests that the purpose of recognizing faces has its roots in the "parent-infant attraction, a
quick and low-effort means by which parents and infants form an internal representation of
each other, reducing the likelihood that the parent will abandon his or her offspring because of
recognition failure".[9] Allen's work takes a psychological perspective that combines
evolutionary theories with Gestalt psychology.

Biological perspective

Research has indicated that certain areas of the brain respond particularly well to faces. The
fusiform face area, within the fusiform gyrus, is activated by faces, and it is activated
differently for shy and social people. A study confirmed that "when viewing images of
strangers, shy adults exhibited significantly less activation in the fusiform gyri than did social
adults".[10] Furthermore, particular areas respond more to a face that is considered attractive,
as seen in another study: "Facial beauty evokes a widely distributed neural network involving
perceptual, decision-making and reward circuits. In those experiments, the perceptual
response across FFA and LOC remained present even when subjects were not attending
explicitly to facial beauty".[11]

Society and culture

Facial surgery

Cosmetic surgery can be used to alter the appearance of the facial features.[12] Maxillofacial
surgery may also be used in cases of facial trauma, injury to the face and skin diseases.
Severely disfigured individuals have recently received full face transplants and partial
transplants of skin and muscle tissue.[13]

Caricatures

Caricatures often exaggerate facial features to make a face more easily recognized in
association with a pronounced portion of the face of the individual in question—for example,
a caricature of Osama bin Laden might focus on his facial hair and nose; a caricature of
George W. Bush might enlarge his ears to the size of an elephant's; a caricature of Jay Leno
may pronounce his head and chin; and a caricature of Mick Jagger might enlarge his lips.
Exaggeration of memorable features helps people to recognize others when presented in a
caricature form.[14]

Metaphor

By extension, anything which is the forward or world-facing part of a system which has
internal structure is considered its "face", like the façade of a building. For example, a public
relations or press officer might be called the "face" of the organization he or she represents.
"Face" is also used metaphorically in a sociological context to refer to reputation or standing
in society, particularly Chinese society,[15] and is spoken of as a resource which can be won or
lost. Because of the association with individuality, the anonymous person is sometimes
referred to as "faceless".