How Physiognomy Works, According to an Expert

As we go through our daily lives, we are always judging people based on their appearance, consciously or otherwise. We think and say things like, "He looks friendly. She seems smart. He seems mean." And so on. This is a universal practice across all human cultures. But what if I told you that this practice of judging a book by its metaphorical cover is not resulting in your unfounded instinct or judgmental bigotry, but is rather a well-founded practice with a long and respected history? Let me welcome you to the world of physiognomy, also known as face reading.

What Is Physiognomy?

Physiognomy is the art and science of determining someone's personality and mental characteristics based on their physical appearance. The word derives from the ancient Greek physis, meaning nature, and gnomon, meaning interpreter. The rules and principles of physiognomy have developed continually over thousands of years, building up a rich library of observations, theories, and works for us to study.

History of Physiognomy

Now, physiognomy is a very ancient practice, and it's found in pretty much all human civilizations. Most famously, the ancient Greeks practiced it. You find writings from Aristotle, some of Aristotle's students, Polemon, and others discussing ancient Greek theories on physiognomy and how it related to both personality characteristics and medicine.

Now, the Greeks took their theories of physiognomy from the ancient Egyptians, and the Egyptians specialized in the temperament, which is observed from the side profile and the body. This aligns with the Greek four temperaments — if you know anything about the four humors, it derives from that. We have choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic or nervous, which we'll get more into later. Now, the Greeks took this and they added on the interpretation of the face shape, which again we'll get more into later.

Throughout the Roman, medieval, and Renaissance eras of European history, people took these observations and theories from the Greeks and the Egyptians, and they added on more observations until it eventually culminated into the modern tradition of western physiognomy, or face reading, which is what I practice. It was all finally formalized into one theory under the name of morphopsychology in France in about the 20th century.

Now, while all this was happening, the Arabs, the Chinese, and the Indians were all developing their own theories of physiognomy independent from each other, and pretty much all arrived at the same conclusions. But where these theories differ is in their focus. Eastern face reading, such as in China and India, tends to focus a lot more on fortune-telling and trying to predict the future. Whereas western face reading, found in Europe and elsewhere, is much more focused on trying to simply determine the personality. And that is what I practice.

Temperament vs. Personality

Now, western face reading, or morphopsychology, as I mentioned before, splits the human personality and the body into two main sections that we can study: the temperament and the personality.

Now the temperament is inborn and unchanging. It is things like energy level, how you focus, how you work, how you play, need for sleep, best climate, best sort of diet — those sorts of things. So it's much more bodily and physical than necessarily mental, although it does have an influence on that. And as I mentioned before, the four temperaments are the same as the four classical Greek temperaments. You have the bossy choleric, the fun-loving and optimistic sanguine, the very chill and enduring phlegmatic, and the gloomy, sensitive, and pessimistic melancholic.

So on top of this layer of temperament, the sort of foundation of the personality, we add the personality proper. Personality comes from the Latin word persona, which means mask. So the persona, or personality, is a mask that our temperament builds up throughout life. And since it is a true mask, we can see this personality from a person's face. The face shape in general tells us someone's personality archetype — whether they're more of a warrior, diplomat, businessman, philosopher, those sorts of things. And then the individual facial features sort of fill in the finer details of someone's personality.

Now I know what you're thinking — this probably sounds like a bunch of superstitious hooey. And for a long time, physiognomy and face reading were considered that. They've fallen in and out of scientific favor, but we are in a new renaissance of physiognomy thanks to AI and neural networks.

AI & the Return of Physiognomy

A good resource for the timeline of physiognomy comes from the National Library of Medicine. It's actually a pretty good history of the whole science, even though it is very clearly anti-physiognomy — it tries to link it with the Nazis and racism, even though it has nothing to do with those things. And it even ends on a positive note for physiognomy, even though it's very clearly biased against it, when it says that modern AI, neural network, deep learning technology has vindicated physiognomy. I'm going to go through just a few of those cases here so we can see what I'm talking about.

Peer-Reviewed Studies

In 2018, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, there was a very highly cited study published where researchers found that a neural network, when trained properly, could accurately determine a person's sexual orientation from their face alone.

Then in 2022, a group of Indian scientists actually published a study that showed a deep learning neural network could determine facial features associated with autism. And this actually built on a 2019 study that originally determined there was a link between certain facial features and autism, having mostly to do with the eyes and the mouth.

Then finally, in a pretty important landmark study published in 2024 in American Psychology, three Stanford scientists used facial recognition technology to try and see if an AI could determine someone's political orientation from their face alone. And they found that not only was it highly accurate, it was more accurate even than human assessors.

Conclusion

So I give these studies to show that science shows a lot of aspects of our personality — our sexuality, politics, mental characteristics, neurodiversity, even some things I didn't cover (there are studies going into religiosity and physiognomy) — all sorts of different traits. These are etched into our faces. People can tell stuff about us just by looking at us. The only thing is, they don't know what they're doing. They're going off of instinct.

The purpose of this channel is to spread the knowledge of physiognomy. Help you guys to better know yourselves, know people around you, get better relationships by using this knowledge and learning what it is that we see that tells us certain things about people's personalities — because there are specific traits that correlate with specific personality features. I'm going to be going into all of those on this channel.

Now, if you want to get in touch with me about learning more about this stuff, getting a face reading, consultation, or analysis done for yourself or someone you know, check out my Services page, where you can find a number of packages, ranging from general personality analyses to phenotype classification to in-depth personal consultations on love, business, spiritual growth, and more.

This article is based on a transcription of my first YouTube video, which you can check out here.