Beautiful faces

I usually judge a book by more than its cover.  I like a good review or reputation, a synopsis or a preview skim, that opening paragraph that is ok or the description on the back that has the right keywords - oh wait that's on the cover, isn't it?  The back cover.
That said, I once bought a music CD based on the colours on the cover art - no regrets at all, the music was just as pink - effusive and beautiful - as the image that teased it.

Play full album here :) 

I recently became interested in my face - in judging or perhaps engineering what people see, say in a photo.
I've usually not been interested in my face in this way.  I usually just think of my face that "it is a face" - it does what it's supposed to do, I'm sure, medically/biologically, so I am glad.  That's my response to body image stuff for the most part - whatever, I'm gorgeous, whatever, it works, what--ever. 
Girls are supposed to (are pressured to) care more.  In Nigeria for example, I would sometimes throw on some lipstick and almost always wear earrings to fulfill the societal requirement that female faces cheer the world like a flower.  On days when I care, I'd wear mascara - the slightest extra definition of your eyes makes photos work.
I know the tricks, for using makeup to create cheekbones and slim-noses for example, especially thanks to Kevin, fabulous! LA makeup artist and consultant for our play The Misanthrope back in the day.  (I remember he was on standby/retainer for Sharon Stone for the Oscars and had to leave us with bags of makeup and lots of instructions because he would not be around to help us anymore...wow, like over a month of dedicated work to sell one face at one show.)
Anyway, you learn about facial light, lines, and colour for theater.  I just refuse to throw away my 3D, 5D, 10D life to play a daft character lol.  Girl. 

Photo composite: Man at 5 and 50

A few years ago, I looked in a passport photo of mine and thought - wow, no wonder people respond to me in such manner at work - with a bit of distance and a bit of awe.  In that period I looked smart, a little too smart in the manner of a pickpocket or something - someone in search of an opening or a shortcut.  Yoruba: eni ti ori 'e n s'ise bi aago - my head (brain) going at a quick pace like a clock.  Also I was pretty, again in the manner of a pickpocket or something.  A fresh face, smooth, youthful and unremarkable, fake-innocent, to blend in with the wood, sand, stone, brown, and activity in the hypothetical town - a pickpocket wouldn't be someone with a distinctive monster face or they would get nabbed, right?  Oh well, the job I then got was to train engineers, so I guess my darting eyes didn't put people off too much.
I have many passport photographs saved over many years of visa applications, bank and job applications, and such nonsense.  I should look at them all sometime.

I've heard, mostly from my parents, about my nose being big.
It is a copy of my father's nose, so I am glad - because I like the guy.  I'd better tell him again - it's been a while since I said something mushy like that.  Like, yesterday I checked out his WhatsApp messages to me and there were some funny ones in there.  I coulda shoulda said these are sooo funny dad, but they were by now week-old messages and I would ... too complicated.   I don't often look at my phone or the messages it may contain.
I'm also glad because I think when a kid (a girl at least) has a big nose, she is less likely to 'throw her life away' herself since she does not think she's pretty (like an ornament, a flower), and she's more likely to be taken seriously in the public sphere because she's a little ugly like many serious leaders that the people know.
I remember also that my parents fretted over the crater in the middle of my nose which I got from nurturing and then popping a giant boil when I was 11 years old in boarding school.  I used to have a lot of pimples and disturb them constantly, and with the germs or whatever we were dealing with in boarding school, it was a short step from pimple to boil - then I got the biggest I'd ever had, that grew over a week or two to maybe 1cm^3.
The boil was excavated in an extravagant ceremony led by classmate and boil-popping hobbyist Inyang.  She now goes by her English name and photographs people for a living, let's protect her identity loool.  That day there was pus, there was a solid rod of caked pus-like material (at the instant when she dislodged that, tore it away from the tissue beneath, my days-long headache vanished) and of course there was blood.  And a lot of pap/cheese-like, watery-sometimes, yellowing and greening and graying and whiting rubbish pus.  It was fun.  Left a hole on my nose.  The hole is long covered-up naturally of course - nothing is forever - but the special contour on my nose remains.

I used to pick my nose.  And eat the flakes/chunks/goo.  I used to have an often-running nose.
Now I never ever eat it.  But I still sometimes pick.  Don't tell anyone.

Almost a year ago when I started to care - yes, this is about a boy that I like looool - I noticed my chin.  I have a real chin.  It has a droop of fat on each of its two halves.  It's not a girly chin.  It's a chin that wants to be noticed.  It's a chin that wants to punch and break your jaw.  A chin that makes you want to add on a Persian beard and braid the rich, dark hair and decorate the fat braid with a royal blue ribbon.
Haha, like they said, I should have just been a boy.  Lol.

I don't take many photographs.
One because - why the face?  Why not the ear?  Or the palm or an arm?  To represent a person.  So, no, I don't believe.  You can read this as me being ashamed of my face but you would only be a little correct.
Two, because I don't use photographs and usually lose them anyway.  Like the box-full I left in California with all my belongings while I moved back to Africa with two suitcases - all gone.
Three? I have more than enough.  One photograph is fun, as in fifty years ago.  Ten is a great and enjoyable variety and I have far more than ten.  But ten thousand photographs is junk, a landfill of garbage, or in 2018 of instagram, just data to be mined lol.
Four, relating to the fact of not using photos in life, is the fact that institutions just use photos to note that I am African/nonwhite/darkskinned so fuck off, and I am maybe a female yet annoyingly not a cheering flower so definitely fuck off.  I mean, if I'm a great painter, the point is not my face, right?  The point is my painting.
I am a great painter.  You fuck off.  LOL.

That said,
Yesterday I was looking to learn how to pose for photographs of my face that would look pretty or at least not alarming, because if you just capture this fantastically complex sculpture in 2D without a plan you end up with something that does not look like what people want to see - look like a grandmother or older, or a professor, clergy member or politician, or generally like an amoebic monkey - delete delete!
There was light from a window on one side of my experiment.  My face in the mirror tilted at a three-quarter-frontal grabbed the light on the bridge of my nose in a way that continued the arch of my brow and was very black-and-white-movies-professionally-shot.  Oh yeah, I really looked like a girl here, like someone's Casablanca female-movie-star fantasy.  The nasal arch highlit, there was also a dot of light in the middle of my nose, which I liked then thought sadly would always be wiped off if one ever did a professional shot.  They would call it a blemish and airbrush it away.  There would be no excuse to leave it in.

This whole charade with faces, who is really deceiving who?

In the past week I made my best discovery yet about my face: that it does not have two perfectly equal halves.   Ah, this explains why I look alluring from many various angles but usually not straight on, and it's related to this stuff I found online about how when normal people (like you) judge attractive faces (again, with this most popular of angles - the face straight at the camera, passport photo type) it's symmetry they're judging, with less symmetric faces being judged less attractive.
Anyway,
I found that my eyes are different.  Even my cheeks below the eyes are different.  In fact, looking 3/4 in the mirror on my right side I look remarkably more like my mother and doing the same on my left I look like my father.  Yep.  My right eye just pops more, it's bigger, bigger white and bigger dark part, sometimes not the same shade of white, slightly higher in my face and higher front-to-back too, with a more raised perky eyebrow over it even, and a chunkier cheekbone and fatter cheek below the eye.  My left eye is a little tired, relatively speaking, just seeming like a cooler, more thoughtful or easygoing person.  Looool.  That's how I've managed to trick everyone, eh, and to look like my mother and like my father and have people argue who I resemble.

Photo collage from "How Faces Change With Age"

Faces keep changing - I could hear my face shift as my mouth healed last year when I got a tooth removed.  I can feel my head shift when I learn a lot or work my brain hard.  I have a big head.  It will change some more.  You know, the left/right side will learn more about what the other side is doing and come to an agreement.  Or something.  Or not.

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