Faces are my topic de jour (Do you detect a hint of desperation?) A Pharyngula post started me on this track. He suggested googling for the images that came up when you put your name in the search box.

I had a quick check to make sure no images of me came up for my name. Phew. They don’t. But page after page of smiling healthy successful-and-popular-looking heathers sort of creeped me out. It put me in mind of a pretty good old film with that very premise, with Christian Slater and Winona Ryder.

And it started me thinking about faces. How we (OK then, I) pretty well tend to judge people by their faces. How “your face is your fortune” and so on.

Blimey, Nintendo are bringing out a video game based on facial yoga “to appeal to women”, according to the Guardian. So, men don’t have faces, then?

Well, it turns out they do. This is from the BBC. It related to something that has always stuck in my mind since I read a book about the “Guinea Pig Club” (World War II airmen with burnt or destroyed faces who underwent pioneering facial reconstruction.)

How devastating it must be to lose your facial features. Every interaction with the world must be so painful. And I suspect we are generally a lot vainer now than people were at that time. Although, our society can’t take all the blame. Have you ever read a folk tale where the heroine and/or hero weren’t beautiful? So, I guess vanity goes pretty deep.

It’s got the title “In pictures: Faces of Battle”. It’s about an exhibition showing pictures of men whose faces were destroyed in World War I. The BBC warn you it’s quite hard to take. It also tells about the surgeon – Harold Gillies – who pretty well invented plastic surgery to help them. The last slide says:

Appearance-obsessed
Faces of Battle opens to the public on 10 November.
“We know it’s a difficult exhibition to come to, but people should be able to see what these injuries looked like,” Ms Doty says.
“And we want people to reflect on their own appearance – what would it mean if that changed?
“We live in an appearance-obsessed society and if you say ‘plastic surgery’, people think Nip/Tuck. But when they see this they’ll hopefully realise what it’s really about.” (from the BBC slide.)