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 interpretations.

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 below:

• 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.