Face Value ; The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women’s lives

Face Value ; The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women’s lives

By – Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

Year - 2016.

Review by Sampson I. Onwuka

 “The research on attractiveness may not make us feel more or less appealing. But it can be a guide post for where we want to focus our energies.” Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

In this book ‘Face Value’, the author discusses some of the relevant etiology of the word beauty in context of similar adjective – ‘pretty’ ‘lovely’ ‘alluring’ ‘stunning’ ‘striking’ ‘cute’, and show how they differ from each as they differ from beauty and in doing so, she widens the landscape of what is perceived as beautiful.  She complains that words English language may assign ‘beauty’ ‘pretty’ to female gender but in her view such impression more than condemns the woman. There are various ways of writing about beauty and face value. One of the ways you can discuss ‘face value’ is to emphasis beauty in context of Hollywood or in terms of Gothic art – which I think it’s a phase or Vampires attractiveness which I think is another phase – both of which the author implores and uses it to separate pre-conceived notions on what is traditionally regarded as beautiful from what the street see in a woman or a man. She may not have discussed Mona Lisa in context of modern art or narrated for the audience her impressions of Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, but she mentions Nicole Kidman as avatar for beauty. An Anatomy of Nicole Kidman – being an actor is her incarnations in 13 motivations (movies) shows her disappearing body structure – less of her face and therefore cannot hold court on face value.  

The author uses several analogies in promoting the academic argument that perhaps not everybody is qualified to speak of beauty. That science is a body of facts; politics is a relapse to private and public opinion but in the subject of beauty everybody speak their mind as if they were primarily concerned with impressions. The issue of impression begins for her with facial representation usually effected through make-up, it is the face that catches the attention and focusing some ‘energy’ on the face can illicit some level of attention which may not exactly happen without your make-up. According to her theory there is something interesting about the human face, it is more interesting when the art of make-up like other expectations of beauty is put into the overall presentation. It is expected that the author is viewed as a physiognomic that equates make-up to beauty especially her flirt with the secondary need for make-up – for instance the ambience of therapy.

Yet we can decide that her sloppy masquerade of facial make-up to facial beauty is not the focus of the book, there are non-specific and generalized issues of women in how he society conceive of them. There are elements of the philosophy of ‘face value’ which make it to the book – more than the second meaning of ‘face value’ which is superficial worth of a piece of art, there are questions of attraction; for instance the attraction between two women or the facial attraction between two men. Although she sends the reader to Serena Williams as a examples of female masculinity which she copies. There is a grappling with beauty that transcends facial expression which the author did not wish to indulge.  

For instance, there is an analogy which invokes in pages 36 and 38, concerning a young door man whose handsome face is the only thing that uses to impress his ‘value’ to an elderly woman. The irrelevant mention of this social scenario explains the mind construction of the author ameliorates on her view of face value and affirms that face value is not an idle conjecture of art. Where this is a false analogy on why a face is important, she is probably right that this is the case. She however salvages her comparison of beauty to mascara by leading a profound example of face value when she says that the ‘minds’ is not gorgeous because it is not visible but a face has a routine and separate value because a face is visible. If she invoked the phrase ‘beautiful mind’ in her book, I swear that I was looking for it and didn’t find it. With such trifle, we may form our estimate of the author’ preconception that she renders the idea of beauty as an art that elevates the natural forms of beauty - say for instance our body cannot be called beautiful in its natural form alone – that it requires some work, especially the face that is more visible.

The author argues that there is no ‘face value’ the mind’s construction – although the saying ‘…no act on the face that explains the minds construction’ is not also found in her book, there is an indirect allusion to this theme. The author Autumn Whitefield –Madrano looks at the relationship between a woman’s appearance and her personality, and in her view there is hardly a contrast. A woman’s appearance is hardly a picture of her character. This is not only true for the women but also for the men. What is there in a face that makes anyone looking at it for the first time falls in love with it? What is there in a face that turns the looker sideways and conjure up images of ugliness. Why of the 200 faces used by Hollywood to represent various moods only certain forms of thee faces are rarely accepted, and going at these faces, the movement of the make-up and at least the 12 steps of make up gradually lead new interpretation.  

A third mordant compere is her allusion to a piece of white paper and the impact of crayons. For me, this example raises her intellectual temperature since the comparison on white paper and crayons to female face without make-up scores a full point for the book. With this view, she reveals her struggle and her split between the theme of face value and her defense of beauty in philosophic terms. While we accept her split between beauty in-of-itself and beauty for itself, there is hardly anything Hegelian or Kantian in her total formative idea, she is French in expectation, impressionist perhaps in order of Roland Barthes.  The author would have done more in widening the narrative between the lives of two women or the bi-woman in how she arranges her body to attract other female.

How the author missed the fashion industry is too hard to grasp. What has modern day selfies which explains the human obsession with the self has to do with Facebook or Twitter, or perhaps the future of Facebook which is Face Value (worth). What is the ‘worth of an idea’ asked Oscar Wilder as by Henry James? What is the worth of a face we can also ask? We could do better by asking the experts in the fashion industry, a section which ignored completely, what a marketable face looks like and how to transform any face to meet the expectations of beauty in market places. Speaking of the fashion business, we may comment for instance that a construct between Gloria Furstenberg and Diana Vreeland will give you a mirror reflection of yourself on one hand and a stethoscope of beauty and its probable worth in the market place. The rest is just selfie good for personal use.

“Experiments isolate variables so that they test only one at a time; an experiment on facial attraction might use head shots instead of full-body photographs in order to prevent participants from factoring below-the-neck appeal into their responses.”  An example of this kind of picture is the burst of Emperor Commodus showing only his upper torso up. The sculpture has a lasting effect due to the torso but in so far as the emperor’s face is concerned – his face is ordinary and can be forgotten. From this we can gyrate that there are other ingredients of face value that the book did not alight. There is no section devoted to the fashion industries, excellent examples will make her book a theater piece for conservation since the models themselves will be available for narrative. 

Conception of beauty is not always a question that all beauty is a question of art, yet all beauty is entirely based as they say ‘upon a past.’ Face value concerns several dimension of beauty and from all examples, there are several shades of face value. If she holds her argument about face value with her knowledge of U.S markets and industries and what a good make-up can do for you, she ignores the rest of the world in discussing some of the basic examples of facial beauty and use of make-up. For the sake of argument, there is no mention of Asia examples, no mention of facial beauty from around the world including the facial tattoos among certain Africans and among the Indians. Americans have facial tattoos as well, so also Europa. How does one facial attraction differ from others, how does facial tattoo such as Mike Tyson’s differ from our expectations of beauty? Is there face-worth for such an alteration? Does Mike Tyson tattoo be considered beautiful on the context of its in-laid designs?

That the author failed to tell us more about the therapeutic value of a make-up is one thing, that she did not mention what a make-up looks like and all about is one other thing, that she failed to provide a leading argument on why for instance the make-up of Geisha - especially why the movie version ‘memoir of a Geisha’ differ from Micko Harode in Akira Kurasuwa’s Ran is entirely a different category of omission.  In terms of films and the film industries, Ran is a reasonable reference point especially the role of Micko Harode in narrating a ‘face value’, that is if by definition – face value also includes how a face commands a scene or an audience. The stone face character played by Micko Harode is no minor article; her death at the end of Ran is memorable for the art of narrative and story telling dovetailing a justified end is an imposition from the visual characters of the face which is in turn and in all reality an escape from her character.

If the author would have mentioned some other piece of Hollywood art forms involving the face, perhaps we could see her from larger landscape. In the movie 'Farewell my concubine' there is a feature of facial expression and painting that nearly toppled the behavioral aptitude of the men involved in the Chinese theatrical spectacle. In very hard times, when the communist party was on the rise, there is a part where the men in that movie paint each other face as if it was a therapy. Such characters are not always there in major motion pictures, but the face and the act is what the actor and the director wanted us to see, feel.  We turn to Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet production with Anthony Havelock-Allan and John Brabourne, and set our minds to the last scenes when Romeo (Leonard Whiting) does the line ‘eyes look your last…’ and lying there is Juliet (Olivia Hussey) a face that gave the scene is ending value.

The book is transit between a minor and major; minor since it spoke of the narrow details of beauty and face value – major since the writer has a maturity in narrative. The book fails since it wallows on attractiveness without mentioning other deciding factors of face, or what a face can do to the observer. Some faces are not attractive hence redolent with beauty. Some faces exact their value by how they command the audience or the keen observer. Can a ‘face’ “launch a thousand ships”? A line derived from Christopher Malowe ‘Dr. Faustus with background to the Trojan War concerning the courted beauty - Helen of Troy. Can a face resent anyone who looks upon it?  

 “When I talk with men about how they regarded the tricks of conventional feminity, the truth was that most of them hadn’t given much thought to the matter.” This is true because most men fail to have one, because there is none. It is the woman and her artistry that compel us to see something different and the male artist understanding this fact make us spectators by his embellishing of the art.