In The Face: A Cultural History, historian Fay Bound Alberti asks what our faces really say about us. The result is an elegant history that moves from the ancient Greeks through Renaissance portraiture to the arrival of mirrors, Instagram filters and face transplants, investigating the politics of how we understand ourselves and judge one another.
Bound Alberti’s interest is more than academic. In her forties, five years into researching faces, she was diagnosed with prosopagnosia, or “face-blindness”.
The book is structured around what humans have done to faces — portraying, capturing, mirroring, perfecting and reconstructing them. Early chapters trace the moments when faces gained cultural prominence, particularly during the Renaissance, when portraiture and the availability of mirrors encouraged the idea that identity could be seen — and judged —through appearance. Photography later democratised this process, allowing ordinary people to own a record of their likeness.
Especially compelling is Bound Alberti’s suggestion that while world views shift, many of the prejudices and assumptions projected onto faces remain. Ideas about beauty, identity, morality and worth have long been entangled with hierarchies of race, gender and class — patterns that still shape culture today.
In the second half, she shifts her focus to intervention. Digital editing, cosmetic surgery and aesthetic medicine “to suit both our perceived needs and society’s expectations” are explored with nuance and sensitivity.
Bound Alberti is sympathetic to individuals choosing to alter their appearance, while questioning the industries that profit from the dissatisfaction necessitating it. Her material on facial reconstruction and transplantation is particularly striking.
Scholarly but not unapproachable, The Face ultimately argues that the transformation we need most is one of perception.
Changing how we see — and judge — faces, including our own, is the most challenging and necessary shift of all.
Rose Beer is beauty and health director at The London Standard
The Face: A Cultural History by Fay Bound Alberti is out now (Allen Lane, £25)
