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Preface

Face reading, a practice as old as man, is a universal art that we all use every day—with varying degrees of skill. We all know and respond to facial expressions that indicate fear, anger, merriment, and other moods, and we know from experience that facial characteristics, such as unusually large eyes or big noses, have an important influence on our lives.

But there is a great deal more to face reading than these obvious signs. The face reveals facts not only about a person’s mood, but about his or her character, health, personality, sexuality, popularity, ability to make money, social status, and life expectancy as well.

And just as our faces influence our lives, life in turn changes our faces—for better or worse.

The principles of face reading, or nin so mi (pronounced neen so me), on which this book is based were first developed in China ages ago. As the generations passed in ancient China, doctors and scientists, who were members of the educated and privileged class, noted that body build and facial features had a profound influence on people’s lives, from health and longevity to the degree of economic and social success they achieved. These learned men began keeping notes on their observations.

As time passed, a number of these healers and scholars wrote treatises on the relationships they discerned between the shape of the body, the head, and the facial features, and the character, personality, and other attributes of individuals. Eventually, face and body reading became a recognized profession.

The Emperor and other members of the Imperial Court as well as the elite gentry and military leaders patronized face readers in their professional as well as their private lives, further encouraging the study and use of the practice.

As Chinese learning and influence spread throughout East and Southeast Asia, the art of face reading also spread, becoming especially important in Korea and Japan, where the population was especially drawn to the practice, and it soon became an integral part of their cultures. Thereafter, the art of face reading was systematically applied in all areas of their lives, particularly in politics, business, and arranging marriages. As they did with most of the arts and crafts they imported from China, Japanese practitioners of face reading further refined and added to the scope, depth, and use of the art.

In the late 1930s, when Japan was preparing for all-out war, the Japanese air force called in a face-reading expert to study the faces of new recruits and advise on whether they should be trained as pilots, mechanics, truck drivers, and so on.

This development was what led me to take an interest in face reading. In 1954, when I was editor of Preview magazine in Tokyo, I learned that the face reader who had been called in by the Japanese military was still alive and lived just outside the city.

With the help of a Japanese assistant, I managed to get an interview with him and did a story about his prewar experience.

This led to my doing more research on the subject at the National Diet Library, where I found a trove of treatises, old and new, on the subject.

Beginning around 1960, there was something of a face-reading renaissance in Japan, with more than a dozen scholarly works on the subject published over a period of about ten years.

Face readers, along with palm readers and other soothsayers, once again became common on city sidewalks in the evenings.

In the West, on the other hand, most people regard face reading as quackery, something best associated with fortune-tellers and Gypsies.

This attitude began to change during the last decades of the twentieth century. The publication of a number of English-language books on face reading (including my own), and the appearance of professional business consultants who introduced elements of face reading into their human resources advice, resulted in the skill being taken more seriously.

By the 1990s, mainstream business publications in the United States were reporting that a growing number of leading corporations had taken to calling in face readers to help them decide on new hires as well as on promotions to managerial and executive positions.

The appearance of the Internet has been a further boon to this ancient art, with dozens of sites promoting one version or another.

Most people today would still naturally question the validity of many face-reading claims, and rightly so, because some of the interpretations are simply too esoteric—and often too contradictory—to be accepted without question.

But there are many insights that are so obvious that no one can deny them. These “readings” are so much a part of our built-in psychology and our culture that they are, in fact, accepted without question.

One of the most obvious of these readings has to do with the size, shape, and color of the eyes. An infant, male or female, with big eyes is fussed over from day one and gets special treatment.

Eyes that are blue or green or streaked with gold (as are the eyes of some Vietnamese girls), get an even more dramatic reaction.

The lifelong influence that big, attractive eyes have on an individual is generally profound.

The size and shape of the lips is equally powerful. Not only do they reveal a great deal about an individual’s character, but they also dramatically influence the way other people behave toward that person.

Without question, the size and shape of the nose, the mouth, the teeth, and the ears tell a great deal about a person, and determine to a great extent how other people react to him or her.

The physiological and psychological foundations of face reading are as solid as physics, and knowing how to read facial and bodily features is one of the keys to developing and maintaining harmonious and effective human relationships.

As mentioned earlier, everybody reads faces, whether or not they have had any formal training. It is an automatic response. We do it without thinking. And we also react automatically in both positive and negative ways to the faces we see.

Going beyond one’s naturally programmed ability to read faces can give you not only extraordinary insight into what motivates and compels people, it can also dramatically increase your ability to use the knowledge in a more positive and satisfying way.

This book covers over one hundred specific facial characteristics, some of which, admittedly, are on the unusual side. The more esoteric readings are easy to recognize and even easier to discount, but they were discovered long ago and have stood the test of time.

Curiously enough, many of the specific face readings that originated in China, Japan, and Korea are related to love and romance, no doubt because in these countries face reading played such a vital role in choosing mates for so many generations.

On the more obvious level, face reading is a skill that can be learned easily and quickly by anyone, significantly enhancing the potential for one’s business and social success.

Boyé Lafayette de Mente

Tokyo, Japan