The Neglected Nose :)

For far too long, those of us who draw smiley faces draw only the eyes and the mouth. Shame on us! How dare us neglect the nose. You could argue that we dismiss eyebrows, eyelashes, cheek bones, lips, teeth, and ears too, but when you consider how prominent a position the nose takes on our faces, why neglect it? It’s right there, smack dab in the middle of our faces.

We smile with our mouths, yes, and I know you’ve heard the phrase, “smiling eyes,” but noses also respond to a face that smiles. Sometimes they can be rather grotesque, but maybe we shouldn’t pick on them so much. (Sorry.)

All I can say is that while the nose is so obvious that everyone can see it, why do we relegate the nose to such an inferior position on the face? We say, Oh, he has such beautiful eyes. Look at that strong jaw line. She has such sensuous lips.

All of those features make up the face, but your nose, which appears to be in the middle of it all (yes, I know, the eyes appear in the middle of your head), even if you have an unusually high forehead or a gigantic chin, your nose is important.

I remember a magazine article once that discussed our definition of beauty. The author of the article wrote that one of the signs of true beauty was a high forehead. For proof, researchers had babies look at various photos to determine which photos caused babies to stare. The one that grabbed their attention the most was a beautiful woman with the highest forehead I’d ever seen.

My view was that the reason babies were staring at the woman with the excessively high forehead was not because she was beautiful but because her forehead was so high, it could have belonged in the Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum.

To prove to you just how high this woman’s forehead was, let me tell you about my own experiment with the photo in the magazine. I grabbed a piece of cardboard and placed it above the woman’s eyebrows. I had my three youngest kids stand around me.

“I’m going to move this piece of cardboard up and when you think her forehead ends, I want you to tell me to stop.”

After several minutes, they gave up. But I didn’t.

“No, keep watching,” I demanded.

Slowly I moved the cardboard up, up, up, up, all the way up, until finally, after an exhausting hour of listening to chronic complaints, “When will this end?”, the beginnings of a hairline began to emerge. Her forehead had finally ended.

My kids were stunned. Nobody’s forehead could be that high, could it? Somebody must have Photoshopped an extra foot into her head.

Foot in Forehead

Let me pick your brain (not your nose). Is it even slightly possible that the experimenters were wrong? Yes the woman was beautiful, but I’m sure that what caused babies to stare at her was the expanse of forehead that sat above her eyes. As I said you could have added a foot up there. And yet scientists determined that babies stared because high foreheads indicated true beauty.

Know what I think? And I’m not just saying this because I have a short forehead – all of those researchers had high foreheads too.

And what about the chin? When you think chins, who comes to mind? Jay Leno, of course. If researchers had shown photos of people with extremely large jaws, babies might have stared at them too. So, according to that line of thinking, Jay Leno is beautiful. (He does have pretty eyes.)

But back to noses. From now on my smily faces will include noses.

(:>)

 Heckle_and_jeckle_promo_picture

The fact that the face now looks like Heckle or Jeckle does not prevent me from using my new smiley face, and the fact that my smiley face takes longer to type than the original smiley face does not hinder me in the least from posting my new Heckle Jeckle smiley face at the end of every post. (:>)

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3 thoughts on “The Neglected Nose :)”

  1. The nose knows all. I think the nose gets a bad rap because of what it hides on the inside. But you do hear people say, “She has the perfect little nose” I never got that but it is out there! fun post!

    1. Yes, the nose knows, and without it we wouldn’t be able to taste. Poor nose. Neglected all these years, stepping aside to give the eyes and the lips all the glory. (:>)

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