How Do You Feel About Your Face?

by Alexandra Molotkow

A face is a lot of responsibility, and like anything it changes faster than you can figure it out. My face looks to me like a totally different face than the one I had five years ago, but it seems to change from month to month.

“Understand your own cuteness before it is too late and you’ve lost it,” Wayne Koestenbaum writes in “Advice to the Young.” I read that during my last summer of cute; that fall I started growing out my bangs. It’s interesting how subtly but definitively the switch occurs, from cute to something else, not worse, but different, and you clock it mostly in strangers’ faces. You miss the look of mild relief when someone notices you at the counter or across the subway aisle. When you’re cute, people leave the door ajar. But it took losing my cute to understand how much control I had over my looks, the way you understand flirting much better once you get into situations where you absolutely can’t.

Now I think of my face as a muscle, rather than something decorative. It has duties; I make it work for me. Trying to look pretty, for me, has always felt like a chore at best, and, like high heels, a limit on my mobility.

I love a pretty face, but I’ve fallen in love with people I didn’t like the looks of at all. Once I’d fallen for them, it wasn’t just that their features endeared themselves to me — their entire face rearranged itself. A face is a concept.

Here are some excellent faces:

How do you feel about your face? Let’s talk!