Instant Genius - What faces reveal about us and the societies we live in

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

The human face contains more than 40 muscles, giving us an ability to visually express our thoughts and emotions that is unique in the animal kingdom. This has perhaps led to a long-held obsession to uncover the many mysteries of our faces that has persisted in everyone from artists, scientists and even anthropologists for thousands of years. But where is this trend heading? And is it doing more harm than good? In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Fay Bound-Alberti, the founder of the Centre for Technology and the Body at King’s College London, to talk about her latest book, The Face: A Cultural History. She tells us how the idea of the perfectly proportioned face that began in classical art continues to persist in today’s social media beauty trends, the various attempts that have been made over the years to determine a person’s good or bad qualities based on their facial characteristics, and explains the challenges we’re currently confronted by thanks to the rise of new technologies such as facial recognition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio. to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts

talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor of BBC Science Focus. The human face contains more than 40 muscles, giving us an ability to visually express our thoughts and emotions that's unique in the animal kingdom. This has perhaps led to a long-held obsession, to uncover the many mysteries of our faces that has persisted in everyone from artists, scientists and even anthropologists for thousands of years.

But where is this trend heading? And is it doing more harm than good? In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Fay Boundalberti, the founder of the Centre for Technology and the Body at King's College London, to talk about her latest book, The Face, a cultural history. She tells us how the idea of the perfectly proportioned face that began in classical art, continues to persist in today's social media beauty trends. The various attempts that have been made over the years to determine a person's good or bad

qualities based on their facial characteristics. And talks us through the challenges we're currently confronted by thanks to the rise of new technologies such as facial recognition. So, Faye, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Oh, you're welcome. So today we're talking about your new book.

the face, a cultural history. So a really, really fascinating topic, you know, when you think about we have words, tone of voice, body language, things like this, etc., to express our thoughts and feelings. But I think possibly we can say that we humans are unique in the animal kingdom and that we have such deeply expressive faces. I think there's something like 40 odd muscles in our faces that allow us to do this. And you're like a historian, among other things, by trade. And let's have a look at what you talk about in the book then. Our fascination with faces.

So you start off talking about portraits and art. So what are some of the first depictions that we see of faces in early art? And what do they look like? I suppose what's really important about the faces, as you say, it's the most important organ of our communication. And the reason I start with arts in the book is because I think there are two critical issues, one of which is how do we represent the face? And the second part of the question that interests me is then what do we do with that?

So in this analysis of the changing meanings of the face over time, I focused on portraiture as a way in, because we tend to think of the face as something that is inevitable, universal, and identifies us as us, but it's really quite a new thing for us to focus on the face as being an index to us. So in the book, I chart the ways in which portraiture evolves from being really about signs and symbols and a symbol of the state, for example, like it would find on coinage, or a symbol of religion that we might find in a church for a depiction of Jesus and the Saints to being, by the Renaissance time, very much more representing a person and an individual,

which is to do with the development of humanism, a focus on the self, a focus on emotions. So what we're really seeing when we look at the history of how the face has been represented is kind of the story of how the face comes to matter in a way that it didn't in the past. Yeah, so let's sort of continue with that a little bit, but this also relates to something that's very, very current. So in terms of portrait paintings, so everyone will have seen pictures of the Mona Lisa, if not in real life, you know, somewhere or another, or, you know, the girl with a pearl earring, or like you say, religious paintings of Jesus or the Madonna, etc. And in these paintings, typically a lot of attention to detail is paid in the face to express a certain feeling or, you know, an idea of perfection in some ways. So you also talk about this notion of symmetry and the idea of beauty that sort of started a long time ago. Can you run us through that?

Yeah, so there's a focus in classical art really on the notion of the golden ratio, which is about symmetry and proportion. And this is something that we've revisited periodically in history. And it was important in the Renaissance. and arguably the Mona Lisa was constructed along this way, but there's no certainty, and people do disagree about whether it was or not. But that sense of order and proportion that we find in nature people have looked for in the face, what I find really challenging now is that we've always been obsessed,

really, since the Renaissance probably, in terms of the face revealing something core about ourselves. And that's because if you think about, the history of the face. We've gone from a period where people wouldn't really have seen themselves in a mirror, not really have seen that many people. If you think about the medieval period, most people lived in a village, they didn't travel more than 20 miles outside of that. They'd have known the members of their family, the village. They would never have owned a mirror because only very rich people owned mirrors. So they spent their lives

not thinking about faces. And we've transitioned to a time where post the industrial revolution and post-industrialization, we see so many faces. more and more faces of strangers, there's more of a sense of needing to identify people by their faces in a different way. And now with social media, with digital culture, we see millions of faces and we'll never know those people. But this idea, this single thread that we know a person by their face is important because in the classical period, it becomes entangled with physiognomy and this sense that you can tell about a person's soul from their outside. you can tell if they're a good or a bad person. And there are all kinds of codes developed for that.

And symmetry is core to that. So symmetry, a symmetrical face means you're a good person. And what we've done today is we've come back to those kinds of ideas, but we've focused on these very Western ideas about beauty. And we've said that they're important for how we represent ourselves in the world. And they underpin a lot of the things that cosmetic surgeons use on social media as a way of talking about what is optional. beauty and look, it belongs to the ancients and it belongs to this. So I suppose in lots of ways

what the book is about is about the stories we've told about the face and how they become repackaged and repurposed for new reasons. And all of us worry about what we look like and all of us want to look better. And we're sort of, we're chasing this treadmill really about how to look the way that we'd like to look so that we're treated better in the world, which is a sort of self-perpetuating cycle, where we're treating as important something that's only part of our identity as human beings. Yeah, so we'll get up into the modern era in a little bit, but something that I'd like to talk about, which is really fascinating in the book, is the sort of studies and work and ideas of people like Francis Galton and Cesar Lombroso.

Yeah. And so we were just saying there about this notion of beauty, but their sort of the thesis was that faces can reveal unpleasant traits and sort of bad qualities in the faces of criminals. Yes. So someone like Francis Galton, who is the father of eugenics, really, was very committed to the idea that through composite photography and through layering one photo on top of another, you can work out from a person's face whether they're likely to be a criminal, which is building on the work of people like Lombroso, who had this idea that particular face shapes or people,

particular signs of your face could reveal your criminality or your tendencies. And so there are two things really. One is that photography was really important in the development of these ideas because it was the same attitude towards reading the face of a person that we find out in the colonies in determining kind of hierarchies of human value. So it's saying that some people are criminals and you can tell by how they look and some people are worth less than others and you can tell that by the way they look. look. So it's all part of this cataloging around bureaucracy that the Victorians were very keen on.

And I think that that, again, speaks to this idea that we make a lot of judgments about people based on their face. And some of those judgments we've carried through into the modern age through facial recognition systems and algorithms that prioritize particular faces over others. So I think the fact that these issues are still live is really important. Yeah, so before we fully get back into the modern era, you also write about mirrors. So you mentioned it there. This is really fascinating. So it's something we sort of all take for granted now.

You know, we have them in our homes. We'll do our hair, check our outfits, etc., before we leave the house. But if you go back, you know, a good few hundred years, they were sort of seen as these kind of powerful, mysterious objects. Yes. So there's always been an element of superstition, we'd call it, around mirrors, this idea that they might let the spirits in, there's a whole other world. And we find that in things like Alice through the looking glass, and then we still hang on to some of these ideas and a lot of grieving

traditions also about covering mirrors. What I found really interesting about the history of the mirror is that we take for granted that we see ourselves all the time, don't we? I mean, most of us don't really like looking at ourselves in the mirror, but we still check our faces all the time. And it struck me as incredible when I was doing the research for this book that really mirror production, most people wouldn't have had a mirror until the 19th century when you have mass production. Mirrors became more common around about 17th century, but earlier, it was only really artists and rich people who would have had access to mirrors or seen themselves. So I wonder what that means about how people, how they felt about themselves

as individuals, because we have so much focus on how we look. And I suppose because we have such an emphasis on screen culture as well. Now most of the time we end up looking at ourselves on Zoom calls, don't we as well? Whereas, you know, if we're not looking at ourselves in the bathroom mirror, but there's something really interesting to me about the material culture that evolved around this interest in our faces, because at the same time as you have mirrors becoming more commonplace in the 18th century, say, before it becomes mass production, you have more and more consumer culture that's about the face, so makeup and razors and all of that sort of paraphernalia of how we look our best in civil society.

Yeah, would you say that maybe then that like the mirror was sort of an early tool in our desire for not necessarily self-transformation, but you know, that sort of idea, you know, self-enhancement, if we can call it that, because all of a sudden we all see what we look like. We think, well, you know, blind me, I'd like to change this or this or something or on my hair's sticking out, it's frizzy or something. Do you think there's a sort of continuum that it probably didn't start then, but that really sort of seemed to kick things off as far as I can tell. In terms of our self-scrutiny and feeling bad about ourselves.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that certainly that kind of staring at ourselves, the worst was concerned at the time that people were becoming too vain or they worried about their reflection too much or, you know, they're all kind of degrees of checking ourselves in the mirror and deciding the ways in which we may not compare well to others. That's the other part of it, of course, which is what you're talking about, which is more and more self-consciousness. And I think for me, it's the rise of consumer culture and also consumer capitalism, where we have more of an emphasis on comparing

ourselves with others, that yes, I think it does originate in the material culture that is very self-focused, that has only become more and more commonplace ever since. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

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forgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So you mentioned makeup there, and I think that's a really interesting thing. So, you know, lots of us use makeup these days to, you know, in effect, the effect can be pretty dramatic. And it's an absolutely huge industry.

You know, you have all sorts of things like full coverage foundations, you know, contour kits, eyebrow kits, all sorts of lip gloss. I guess you would think, you'd assume that this started in sort of the golden era of Hollywood. But what actually is the history of makeup use? Well, ancient Egyptians used a lot of makeup and we're very familiar with this sort of coal eyeliner. And I think we're all familiar too with things like the Elizabethan court and the wearing of the lead makeup to make themselves look very white and so on. And so all of which was tapping into ideas about gender and race. And so there has been a history, particularly in wealthy, for wealthy women in particular, to wear makeup.

And I think the idea that it becomes widespread only really happens with mirrors. Because, of course, most of us don't have ladies in waiting to make ourselves look beautiful in the morning. But you're right, it's such a kind of multi-billion pound industry now with more and more focus, not just on what we look like, but on looking as young as possible because this sort of youthification drive. But, you know, I think you're absolutely right about this sort of notion of Hollywood, because when the consumer culture develops in the way that it does, it's only really when we see sort of the cinema and the silver screen and this idea of the optimum that we're supposed to look like or covet. Where we see the faces of other people so much bigger than we used to on a cinema screen, if you think about the sort of magnified face, it's all part and parcel of the same drive towards a very perfectible kind of. face that we're all supposed to aspire to. Yeah, so let's take this idea one step further then and talk about cosmetic surgery. So these days sort of minor procedures, I guess you'd call them,

such as Botox, dermal fillers, and even in a way minimally invasive, rhinoplasties, etc., they're pretty common. So yeah, no, they are super common. I think there's something like 27 million procedures in, you know, 2020 where there are differences, of course, And the kind of those minor procedures, sort of non-surgical, tweakments they call them, those sort of lunchtime tweakments that people have nowadays, which themselves are problematic because they're not very well regulated. And there's an ongoing discussion in the UK about how they're not regulated at all in terms of you get more security if you buy a ballpoint pen than if you pay to have some of these treatments,

which is quite frightening given that it can have serious consequences if it goes wrong. but also this drive towards cosmetic surgery, which is actually as surgical procedure. There's much more of that. And partly it's related to the rise of social media, which is that what we know is that particularly post-pandemic actually, when people spent a lot more time at home, sitting in front of the computer screen, wondering if they look their best or worrying about how they looked on the screen. together with the rise of social media, what we're seeing is much more of a comparative effect

because surgeons are advertising their wares on social media at the same time as people are comparing themselves to others. We do see particularly actually for young people, these trends whereby the more people use social media, the more they worry about their appearance. And the more they are inclined to see cosmetic surgery as something that is not just inevitable, but something that they do early. So we're seeing people to do preventative Botox much earlier and things like that. And so I suppose what worries me about that is partly the sense that we're introducing this very kind of westernized idea about what people should look like, which brings us back to the golden ratio is this notion that there is only one type of beauty. So you end up with this sort of, you know, homogenized version of beauty that is popularized on social media.

The other thing is that it doesn't necessarily make people happier. And so all of the evidence is really that once we start down that road, we just see what else needs changing. I always think it's like when you sort of realise that you need to do up the kitchen at home and then you do up the kitchen and it makes the lounge look horrible or something like that. You know what I mean? Or you get a new bin and you realise the kettle looks shabby. It's the same sort of thing. It's the more we do, the more there is to be done. And so that worries me along with the sort of the very serious levels of low self-esteem that we're seeing because people are valuing themselves based on how they look.

Yeah, so let's move on then to something that's entirely different from that. And that's people who are having facial surgeries due to injury or perhaps due to some medical condition. So this is relatively new as far as I'm aware. So what can we say about that? Do we know when this all first got started? Yes, the surgical treatment of facial injury goes all the way back to ancient India. And one of the things I talk about in my book, for example, is where people used to have their noses hacked off as punishment for things.

So correcting that and supporting people who've been facially injured has always been part of what surgery is for. It's cosmetic surgery, which is distinct from reconstructive surgery. That's what we see more of in the consumer age of, you know, 1950s onwards. But traditional reconstructive surgery, I became very interested in when thinking about face transplants because that's a really radical form of surgery that has transformed our approach to facial injury, to severe facial injury. And that's one of the things that got me into the book, really, which was thinking, well, how do we swap our face for another if our face is the thing that defines us?

So it's a philosophical quandary, but it's also an emotional one, because I was curious what it felt like to see the face of somebody else when you look in the mirror. There have only been about 50 face transplants around the world since 2005. So it's still classed as experimental surgery. But it really is profound in terms of the impact on patients, because In order to have a face transplant, you have to undergo not just the surgery and the emotional kind of challenges of that, but you also have to go on to immunosuppressants for life so that your face doesn't get rejected. And we're still working out what that means ethically, really, because we don't know for certain that people have happier lives. We do know for certain that it

shortens their lives. So we know that it's worth it if you cannot live with an organ like a heart. We know that it's worth the risks. But we also know that to look different physically and to have a damaged face, if you like, we know that people will have an unhappy life if they are abused by other people. So it's not necessarily that they're having a face transplant purely for the functional reasons of being able to eat and to swallow and all of those things, we know that one of the reasons that it's so difficult to live with what they call a disfigured face. I mean, the language is quite complex

because people with visible difference prefer to call it that, but legally and surgically we talk about disfigurement. So I think what face transplants do is sort of bring us to the heart, really, of what the face is for and why it matters socially, for all of the reasons we've talked about in relation to we get judged by our faces all the time. So the people who decide to undergo a face transplant have to make a really difficult decision based not only on their medical situation but on how other people see them. So another sort of new technology you talk about in the book is facial recognition.

Yeah. So we've kind of casually accepted this entire daily lives. You know, quite often your phone will unlock on that. And, you know, some people have front door locked that will act. in the same way, etc. But it's being used for all different kinds of things and some good, some possibly not so good. So what can we say about that?

I think facial recognition is so interesting because I was speaking to Adam Pearson, the actor, about this, and how he can't unlock his phone with his face because it doesn't recognise him. And so I think there's obviously things to be said about facial recognition, it's limitations of understanding what are faces. But I think there's also something really

challenging about the algorithms involved and the ways in which, as you say, we use, it's been rolled out for lots of different purposes and we don't have appropriate regulation or investigation at each stage because it's become something that's just part of our lives now. And it's used to decide, you know, how a person feels about buying things in a shop. Can we tell from a person's face whether they want to buy something? can we tell whether they're likely to steal? And this is really just harking back to the same kinds of things that people like Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, was looking at it, what can we tell from a face? What can we tell from a person's likelihood to be a criminal? Really, we've taken those physiognomic ideas about good and bad people as reflected in their face, and we've just sort of like layered them into these new systems. And part of the way that we do that is that when the algorithms are designed or when the systems are designed, they don't take proper account of the variability of faces. So they're mostly modelled on white people, so that black people tend to get misrecognised, women tend to get misrecognised.

So we know these are problems. And they're problems too in how we're assessing beauty. Some of the conversations that I've had with cosmetic surgeons who are developing digital technologies to evaluate what a real beauty is. And they're just falling back and leaning back on the golden and mean, you know, we're time and again, we're investing new systems and new technologies with the prejudices of the old. And I think that's where the problem is. We're not really interrogating what are these prejudices to start with. And, you know, technology is only ever as good as its uses, isn't it? And its design, which is what I'd like to see more of, sort of thinking about the reasons the face matters in designing new technologies. So we've got quite a lot of different

topics there. So sort of, by way of closing, do you have any thoughts on where you think all of this is going to go, you know, do you think things are going to get better? Things are going to get worse before they get better? Are you optimistic? Oh, there's so much, but there's so many different things that play, aren't that? I think I would really like to see us take more seriously the reality that there are many different ways of knowing a person than their face. And some of the judgments and decisions that we make about people based on their face, we need to be much more careful about and think about, because we make judgments that affect sentencing in criminal cases and who we give a job to. And this whole notion of that we can tell a person's expressions

that determine whether or not we think they're trustworthy and so on. I mean, there are real-world implications for all of the presumptions and biases that we're not even aware of most of the time, partly because they've been internalised and partly because we think they're grounded in science. I would like to see that change. And the book is part of a sort of a hope that we can have more debates in this area. Like, let's really take apart what we mean by the face and let's see whether it can make a difference to how we feel about our own faces and other people's. In terms of this drive towards perfection, I think we're at a very interesting point when we're talking about some of the regulations that are going on in a situation. Australia, for instance, around social media and young people, we are starting to see more

awareness of the damage that's been done. But I'm also concerned that it's very much shutting the stable door after the horse is bolted. I don't know how we rein some of this back in. And I think it does sort of connect more generally to the fact that there's a lack of accountability for some of the people that are making an awful lot of money out of other people's insecurities. So do I feel optimistic? I'm always optimistic that people, have the capacity to change and that people do want to want to be good and care about other people. But it's difficult to predict what's going to happen. So also this condition that some people have known as

face blindness, where they can't recognise the faces of other people as well as most of us can. So what's that? Well, prosopagnosia or face blindness is, as you say, a condition where we don't recognise people by their faces. And I didn't realize until I was writing this book that I have it. It's on a spectrum in that some people have it worse than others, but the face is not how I recognise a person. And I found that one of the most humbling and challenging areas of my research, because I realized that that was probably the motivation to drive me to try to understand the face in more detail. Because if it is the case that we have spent centuries developing an idea of the face as being the symbol of the self,

and I call that face hood that one person equals one face and it's all evolved since the Renaissance period, what do we do when actually it makes no sense to us? So from my perspective, that also allows me to feel much more optimistic about the face and its meanings, because actually I know people and I remember people based on a whole range of things that aren't just the face. It's how they move, it's how they make me feel, it's their emotions, it's their hair, what they wear. So I think that the face is only a part of what we ever know about a person. And the ways in which we know people is so varied and so separate from what the face has come to being in society, that that makes me feel quite positive about our human capacity

to care about and know other people. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Fay bound alberti. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, The Face, a cultural history. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius

on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel, at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines, or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by

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