"What is a Face?"

Zatea's Response

Is this a trick question?

A face is the thing on the front of your head. If I have to explain: it sees, eats, tastes, smells—it feels, too, but it’s more efficient to use your hands for that.

It is what people usually associate with you as a person, but that thought is misleading. You could be your body, your skill, or anything else, really. Faces are limited. They’re one aspect of many.

If it weren’t for the fact that they see, eat, taste, smell, etc., faces would be useless. Our mouths and eyes and noses could have been arranged in any order. We could have been made with different sense organs altogether. Faces are nothing more than a fact of our construction.

Anevon's Response

A face is where one locates an individual’s identity. It is the image by means of which ‘you’ become known and, by extension, become yourself.

A face is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, you have eyes, a mouth, and a nose, but when these parts are understood together as a face, they become a unit which emotes and speaks. A face reveals ‘you’ to others repeatedly and consistently, and thus has a primarily social function. If its parts and their respective functions were more important than that social function, we would not have given a name to the face as a whole.

Furthermore, a face is something that belongs to us in a way that very few things can. We are born with it and we age with it. We own it in such a way that we have the right and the power to shape it ourselves, just as we shape our positions within our communities. Makeup, piercings, tattoos, surgeries, and other modifications are another kind of speech or emotion: another form of contact with others.

At the same time, though, our faces are lined by their pasts. Each face folds into one which seemed to have been happy, angry, or worried most often; perhaps it even gathers a few scars.

A face is therefore both a social tool and a record. It is a tool insofar as it can be used at its owner’s discretion in order to communicate more clearly. It is a record insofar as it is shaped both by and against its owner’s will as a reflection of past and present identity.

Selfen's Response

Sure, faces are tools, but some people are given screwdrivers, some wrenches, some hammers. Others still are given sewing needles and are nevertheless expected to be able to drive a nail through wood.

And sure, faces speak, but the face and its speech are not the same thing. We associate others’ faces with their speech—what do you associate with your own face? Have you taken the time to watch yourself talk in the mirror? Are you aware of the way that your mouth sometimes twitches at its corners and gives away some part of you without your permission?

A face is more like a ticket, a passport, any slip of paper that is as valuable as it is easy to tear. Only some are widely acknowledged as genuine, and those are the ones that can move freely, more or less. Still, it should be noted, counterfeit is difficult but not impossible.

I won’t pretend the face isn’t seen as an identity. It is recognized as the most revealing part of a person. People think you hide your face only if you have something to hide. Covering up is seen as a negative action, taking away others’ access to the supposed authenticity to which they feel entitled. When you hide your face, others understand you as removing some kind of safety blanket from them: the illusion of being able to know you.

I wonder why the opposite isn’t seen as true. Why is a mask an absence of face rather than a presence of expression? I think you have a real choice to make: be recognized by what you were given for no real reason, or be recognized by what you create.