Visage Project for Physiognomy Data
About the Visage Project: Visage is a project to collect and
organize information about relatively permanent facial features. It
includes methods for storing, retrieving, and inspecting the data.
This information is collected from the writings of many authors and
scholars and is stored in a relational database. These sources
indicate connections between facial features and the person's inner or
hidden characteristics, such as personality or character, and even
more unlikely connections, such as to the person's destiny.
Physiognomy is a term that refers to the appearance of the face and
how it is interpreted. Visage is a database schema for representing
physiognomy and the interpretation of physiognomic signs.
A simple demonstration application shows
some of the ideas behind the Visage project. The demonstration finds
information about the meanings of facial features you select to
describe a face. This application retrieves information from the
database relevant to your description of physiognomy, including an estimation of the
accuracy of the sources of this information. You can decide for
yourself whether the meanings ascribed to the facial features make
sense or not.
You may find the information in Visage interesting and
entertaining, or useless and inaccurate. Visage makes only general
statements about the validity of the information, and provides the
interpretations people have claimed for facial features. It includes
information about the general level of soundness of the
The demonstration application shows the kinds of data that are
incorporated into the database. Physiognomy is related to a number of psychological and other
concepts that have not been structured into a database-compatible
format. Some of these concepts are listed
- Personality People have thought since ancient times that
the face reflects the personality of the individual. Personality
refers to enduring traits or characteristics of the person, not
merely to an ability to impress others. Both facial appearance and personality are products of biological inheritance and the
environment in which the person develops.
- Countenance Also, the database has information about the
countenance of the face. The face is viewed by others who find
meaning in it. The countenance of the face refers to visible
facial appearance and how other people interpret it. People
attribute meaning to faces intuitively, whether the interpretation is
correct or not. Visage tells you what interpretations other people
might make of the face you describe, and whether this interpretation
is likely to be correct.
- Contingencies The face could predict the person's fate or
destiny. Life is a continuous cycle of birth and death. People and
their faces are molded to fit this cycle.