Fay Bound Alberti suffers from prosopagnosia (face blindness), a rare condition she shares with the likes of Joanna Lumley, Brad Pitt and Oliver Sacks. It means she cannot hold in her mind the connection between a face and an individual, even with close relations, friends and colleagues. Face blindness is incurable, its cause not always known, but diagnosis does at least mean you can explain to your boyfriend ‘why, at the movies, you helped yourself to another man’s popcorn’. 

Bound Alberti has circled around her own condition in a distinguished academic career as a historian of the emotions, medicine and, most recently, cosmetic surgery. But now she confronts it head-on in The Face: A Cultural History, a hectic whistlestop tour of facial sciences, technologies and artefacts ranging from portraits, mirrors and physiognomics to passports, selfies and face transplants. She coins the term ‘facehood’ to define the relationship between faces and individuality and claims that faces have been understudied in comparison to emotions and bodies. This book, she says, will change all that. The Face comprises nine interlocking chapters entitled ‘Portrayed’, ‘Captured’, ‘Mirrored’, ‘Perfected’, ‘Grown’, ‘Feeling’, ‘Reconstructed’, ‘Recognised’ and ‘Transplanted’ (spoiler: this last somewhat voyeuristic chapter is not for the squeamish). 

Bound Alberti notes at the outset that unlike those of chimpanzees, with whom we share 99 per cent of our DNA, human faces are integrated within the skull and have twice as many muscles (around forty-three to twenty-three), thereby enabling a huge range of expression. The complexity and cultural distinctiveness