The Physical Characteristics of Different Style Identities Correspond to Real Visual Signifiers of Age and Sex

How's that for a click-baity title, ha ha? 

​(Seriously though, I might be the only person alive who prefers long and dry over short and grabby. I am wholly a nerd.)

At any rate,  here's what I mean:  In my  Style Identity system, when I say that a physical characteristic reads as womanly, or manly, or mature, or childlike, that's generally because that (average) physical difference exists in real life. 

We are all unconsciously aware of the visual signifiers of masculinity and femininity, of maturity and youth. We make instantaneous judgments about other people's age and masculinity/femininity based on visual cues we're not even aware that we are processing.
​
Here are some examples of what I mean. 

• The distance between the upper lip and the nose lengthens as we age. Additionally, this distance is greater in men than in women. So a short distance here, especially accompanied with quite visible top teeth, tends to create a youthful and feminine  -- in other words, an Ingenue-- impression. 

Notice that the top face, with the longer lip-to-nose distance and the hidden top teeth, appears more mature and androgynous than the bottom face.

• Lip fullness peaks in adolescence, and women's lips are on average fuller than men's.  Plumper or puffier lips tend to read Romantic, because  Romantic embodies the fully mature, "pubertal" (I love that word!) feminine essence. Thinner lips, by contrast,  tend to read as Natural. 

​

• Men's foreheads, on average, appear shorter than women's (because they are less vertical, and because men on average have lower hairlines than women).  So short foreheads tend to read as  Natural. 
  
  
• Chin clefts are more common in men than in women. The presence of a chin cleft can increase the overall Natural or Gamine impression of a face.

 

• A dark ring around the iris -- a "limbal ring" -- is more common in children than adults. (Limbal rings fade with age.) So the presence of a limbal ring tends to contribute to a Gamine or Ingenue impression.  

Notice how the eyes on the bottom read as subtly more youthful? They have limbal rings.

• Men tend to have wider noses than women, so a wide nose tends to read as Natural or Gamine, while a narrow nose tends to read as Romantic or Ingenue. 

NB: A viewer makes these judgments in the context of the subject's perceived ethnicity.  So, while it is the case that African noses are on average somewhat wider than European noses, it's not the case that women of African descent appear more visually masculine than women of European descent. The viewer in this example unconsciously takes perceived ethnicity into consideration when processing the visual appearance of a nose. 

​                                    *  *  *  *  *

You may notice that I didn't mention Ethereal, Dramatic, or Classic in this article.

Classics are easy: Imagine that you averaged all male features and all female features. Beauty in a female Classic represents a face that's slightly to the feminine side of that perfect average, and beauty in a male Classic represents a point that's slight to the male side. In Classic men and women both, nothing's noticeably big, or small, or sharp, or round, or high, or low, or full, or thin, or wide, or narrow.  See more about that beauty  here.

As for Ethereals and Dramatics, their beauty derives from archetypes that aren't based in human physical reality. That's a long post, though, so I'll save it for next week.  :-)