I was packing for my Poland trip a couple weeks ago, with the Oscar awards on in the background. While rolling T-shirts, I clocked a comment by the lead actor in the Brazilian film, The Secret Agent, Wagner Moura. He was presenting the nominees in the new Casting category.

Moura commented on how well the casting director had chosen “faces which could have been around in the 70s”.

That resonated with me immediately but I didn’t quite know why. I’m familiar with faces looking specific to a part of the world, e.g. Russian face shapes/jaws being different thanks to the demands of the language, something that’s known as muscular hypertrophy from phonemic demands.

But faces changing over only 50 years is a new concept for me. Is there anything to it?

One of the foremost researchers in the field is Daniel Lieberman from Harvard. His work looks at jaw development related to what, and how, we eat. Our faces and jaws look notably different than did our prehistoric ancestors’, largely because they spent much of their days chewing tough, raw meat and hard fibrous plants. This gave them broad palates, wider dental arches, and more pronounced jaws. Thanks to our softer, cooked, processed foods, over time faces are narrower and longer, and our teeth are more crowded. Do you know anyone who hasn’t had to have their wisdom teeth pulled?

In an article in Harvard Magazine, Lieberman’s research is described:

In one experiment, he fed soft food to one group of pigs, hard food to another. The stresses of chewing made the upper and lower jaws of the pigs eating hard food grow larger. The study suggested that there is a link between smaller jaws and regularly chewing very high-quality soft food. And humans, he points out, have never had greater access to high-energy processed food than they do now. “I think many people today never have to actually chew anything all day long,” he says. “You can see the effects of that shift in our heads now in terms of molar impactions”—small faces and jaws leave too little room for teeth.

What Lieberman’s work describes is evolution over the relatively short span of human history, but when it comes to faces from the 70s being noticeably different he says, nope. In an email he tells me, “I have never seen any evidence or studies on this. So no. And human faces are highly variable. What has changed a lot in the last 50 years is the percent of individuals with overweight and obesity.”

And that, perhaps, is from whence the comment about faces in the 70s springs. Obesity was not such an epidemic 50 years ago so people’s faces were leaner because their bodies were leaner. More people worked physically rather than chained to a keyboard, and most lives were not lived primarily in cars. The casting director would have, perhaps unconsciously, been seeking that “look” which evoked a half century prior to so many people looking fat.

There are also less tangible markers of that period face. Grooming, posture, body composition norms all combine to create a visual type that either looks like it fits in the period, or doesn’t. I recently watched a true story recreation series on Netflix, set in the 70s, and all along had a niggling feeling of inauthenticity despite the hairstyles, clothing and wallpaper. Now I have an inkling of where the dissonance was coming from.

My faithful readers may recall that there are definitely period sounding voices and ways of speaking, as an aside:

Down a related rabbit hole, I discovered there are some interesting studies on the correlation between fuller faces and perceptions of attractiveness.

An article in Frontiers in Psychology found that people can reliably estimate a person’s BMI from facial cues alone. Other studies looked at the correlation between a fuller face and attractiveness judgments, finding that slimmer faces were seen as more attractive, perhaps because the subconscious assumption is around better health = longevity = overall appropriateness as a mate.

Interestingly, a slimmer face is seen as healthier and more attractive, until you hit your 40s when a fuller face gets more positive reaction. They studied this with twins! I do have a friend who credits her weight gain over time as her own method of “filling out the wrinkles”. Now I know she has science behind her choices.

This whole notion of a slimmer, narrower face with a strong, chiseled jawline, gave birth to a school of orthodontics now referred to as The Mews or Orthotropics. If you check out the website you will see it has largely been dedicated to celebrating the founder, the late John Mew, an orthodontist in the UK who, together with his son, developed “mewing” a kind of mouth exercise regimen which involves putting your tongue firmly against the roof of your mouth and applying pressure, for hours at a time, supposedly to modify the jaw structure. The Mews, Senior and Junior, have been in a running war with the British Orthodontic society and, with the death of Mew Sr. last year, his son Mike is left to carry on. He has been expelled from the Society and the dental register in the UK but continues to be active on social media and in media interviews.

Despite all this controversy, mewing has been adopted by incel and looksmaxxing subcultures due to its promise of a more chiseled look and therefore higher attractiveness. You can find countless YouTube videos showing you, in alarming close up, how to press your tongue to the roof of your mouth and keep it there.

Teachers in the UK are reporting students refusing to open their mouths to answer questions, because they are mewing while in class. This comes with some kind of hand gesture across the jaw which many teachers do not recognize nor understand. But they know it’s driving them nuts.

You can watch a new Netflix documentary Open Wide if you’re interested in learning more about this largely debunked science. The American Association of Orthodontists, in a witty bit of criticism, said that "scientific evidence supporting mewing's jawline-sculpting claims is as thin as dental floss".

I found this song, titled, “The Face of Yesterday” from the UK prog-rock band, Renaissance. The singer, Binky Cullom, was with the band for just three months during its transitional stage of moving parts. I haven’t been able to find out what happened to her after.

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