Biography of a wrinkle. Aging, temporality, and transformation of the human face

Faces always tell a story. Medicine men and curanderos of Latin America think that people without wrinkles have no personal history. Their faces are like blank spots. They are, therefore, illegible because they have no meaning. The face of a baby is yet to be written as it is wrinkles-less, whilst the face of an adult is a wrinkled face, which shows signs of time. Whilst traditional medicine has gener- ally assigned a positive value to wrinkles-the value of time, experience, unique- ness-modern conceptions of the face somewhat challenge this view. The history of physiognomy is rich of examples that assign to facial wrinkles a pivotal role in face readings. Girolamo Cardano, for instance, in his Metoscopia, sets out an en- tire system for physiognomic reading based on astrology and divination that was centred around the frontal area of the face, leaving all the rest aside. J. Taxil, C. Spontone, F. Finella and many others argued pretty much the same. George Li- chtenberg, who is usually and erroneously thought of as being an anti-physiogno- mist, thought that the face is like a message board onto which the signs of times are displayed. Lichtenberg not only thought that signs of time are visible and can be read in people’s faces, but he asked whether there an influence of external events and circumstances–the environment–on people’s faces. He suggested that a wrinkle can become a fixed facial trait by means of repetition, as if the repeated facial expression can with time become a fixed trait, thus positing a link between dynamic and static facial traits. Today the paradigm of physiognomy has lost its grip and new cultural norms have emerged in order to regulate the canons of beauty and social appearance. Whilst wrinkles are the natural history of change displayed on one’s faces, wrinkles in other contexts are thought of as traces that should, instead, be removed, masked, altered or hidden away. This has to do with cultural norms of beauty and attractiveness that convey the idea that human faces are better and more attractive when the face is rather plain and young.