The instant of passing on a street corner, the few seconds beside someone in an elevator, the first cut of a face on screen. People evaluate another’s facial features before thought. The size of the eyes, the line of the nose, the shape of the mouth, the outline from cheek to jaw. Facial features are not the sum of these parts; they catch a person as the impression that the arrangement and balance emit all at once. The most fundamental axis of sexual appeal, and the hardest to verbalise.

Facial features (Japanese: 顔立ち, kaodachi) denote the form and arrangement of the parts of the face, taken as a whole, composed of both skeletal structure and the soft-tissue padding over it. In the context of sexual and romantic preference, they have functioned alongside body shape as the most fundamental evaluative axis.

Components

Facial features can be analysed as a combination of many independent elements. The first axis is balance of arrangement: how close the vertical and horizontal placement of eyes, nose, and mouth is to ideal proportion, and the degree of left-right symmetry, indicators discussed in evolutionary and cognitive psychology as objective measures of beauty. The second axis is the form of the parts: eye size and shape, single or double eyelid, the line of the nose, the thickness of the lips, the position of the cheekbones, the shape of the jaw. Each part subdivides further: the eyes alone include upturned and downturned shapes, several eyelid forms, iris colour, and lash quantity and length. The third axis is padding and age: with the same skeleton, thick or thin cheek padding changes the impression greatly, and signs of youth (taut skin, round cheeks) intersect with signs of maturity (a tightened outline, shadowed eyes).

Historical variation

The ideal of facial features has continually shifted with period and culture. The Heian female image idealised the hikime-kagibana style of narrow eyes and a small nose, with a full round face, pale skin, and long black hair at the core of beauty. In Edo-period ukiyo-e, the female images of Kitagawa Utamaro set a standard of a long face and sloping shoulders. Westernisation from the Meiji era broke this ideal, and faces with clearly defined features rose as the new standard. Postwar, the features of Western actresses were referenced as ideals, with double eyelids, a high nose bridge, and large eyes at the centre of preference. From the 1990s, fashion magazines standardised wide eyes, a small face, and a pointed jaw as the “attractive face.” From the 2000s, Korean-wave influence brought an oval outline, straight brows, and a high nose bridge as a new ideal.

The mainstream facial features of adult work shifted in parallel. The AV dawn of the 1980s favoured strong features paired with large breasts and a glamorous build; from the late 1990s, actresses with softer, smaller faces increased; from the 2010s, the differentiation of “amateur-style” and schoolgirl-style genres established a lightly made-up, plain face as an independent axis of preference.

Reception psychology

Why do facial features function as the most fundamental axis of sexual evaluation? First, the face is the centre of individual identification, the most basic cue for recognising who someone is; the object of desire is not an unspecified body but a specific other, whose individuality concentrates in the features. Second, the face is the centre of emotional expression, and emotional exchange in sex is established by reading changes in expression; the dynamic expression of the face forms a separate axis from static features, yet the two are continuous. Third, facial features have been treated in evolutionary terms as signs of health, age, and genetic quality; skin condition, symmetry, and skeletal regularity have been subject to selective pressure in mate choice, and the culturally constructed standard of beauty is layered on top of this biological base.

Derived usages

A “well-ordered face” is balanced with few faults; a “striking face” has strongly impressive individual parts; a “non-Japanese-looking face” carries Western or mixed features; a “baby face” looks younger than its age, and an “old-looking face” looks more mature. Each usage reads a state of the features into a social or aesthetic category.

Related terms

• Lips
• Mouth
• Teeth
• Hair fetish