What Happened to Your Face?

What Happened to Your Face? How the human countenance became something to study, edit, optimize, and scan. The physiognomists promised that your character could be read from your features. Certain forms of facial-recognition technology have revived that old fantasy in digital form. Several months ago, my partner and I bought an apartment in South London. Our previous home was a rental in which, for reasons best known to the landlord, there were mirrors everywhere. The bathroom had two; there was one outside on the terrace; in the bedroom, mirrored panels stretched across a twenty-foot-long wall. On moving day, we realized that we had a problem: the new apartment was mirror-free, and because we'd been so spoiled we weren't bringing one of our own. We spent a few days filling our drafty rooms, decanting books, building furniture, and dressing every morning without seeing ourselves in profile. It was a couple of weeks before we bought a simple mirror, wooden and round, to hang above the bathroom sink. By then, I joked, we didn't recognize ourselves.