Physiognomy insists that the soul leaves its trace upon the body, that the face is not simply a mask but a legible map of inner being. Yet this claim becomes unsettled the moment we introduce plastic surgery, accident, trauma, or even the slow metamorphosis of aging and epigenetics. Do these surface manipulations truly alter the soul, or only veil and distort the signal? This essay explores physiognomy not as a pseudo-science of types but as a metaphysical problem: how much of the self is fixed, how much is mutable, and where the line between essence and appearance finally lies.

Welcome back. I recently came across a Youtube channel named Prosopa Insights, with the underlying website here, created by a young man named Taylor Northcutt. His channel delves into the applied science of physiognomy, which is the science of judging people based on their physical characteristics, especially their facial characteristics. This aligns with my own interests: I wrote a big picture overview of this much maligned science in this 2023 post, and Northcutt applies a similar framework to detailed individual analysis. The idea is that there is a direct relationship between one’s personality traits and how one physically appears, and that we all have an inborn ability to quickly discern many traits of another person at a glance. Our first impressions aren’t always right, of course – we have our own subjectivity biases which colors perception – so it is usually proper to withhold judgment (unless one needs to act in the moment) until one can more deeply assess the other.

To preface the continued exploration of this topic, physiognomy is not merely controversial; it is radioactive. Its exile from respectable discourse was bound up with its entanglement in racial pseudoscience, authoritarian politics, and resentments that still haunt its shadow from World War 2 – but these are not the fundamental reason why it was exiled from mainstream thought. Rather, it was exiled fundamentally because it cuts against the egalitarian ideology that forms the core of modern society. To reopen exploration of this topic, then, is not to handle a neutral tool but to enter territory shaped by its very prohibition – in other words, physiognomy cannot be viewed simply as a science in this era, but is colored by being forced into the underground, for good and for ill. This in turn has produced a selective pressure: what survives underground as suppressed knowledge is often the most virulent and least corrigible strains, which introduces a danger of an investigator being seized by the intoxicating clarity of forbidden information. The question, then, is not only whether physiognomy contains truth, but whether one can approach it without becoming possessed by the same revanchist forces that contributed to its banishment – which is necessary if the goal of the researcher is wholeness and not archetypal possession. To engage physiognomy requires not only curiosity but symbolic hygiene – practices of dialectical distance, humility, and the willingness to resist turning insight into ideology.

The Appeal of Physiognomy

What I like about the science of physiognomy is the following:

1. It has been used by mankind for thousands of years, and has only been smeared in the modern era as a pseudo-science (just like astrology, covered previously here, and other ancient practices like bloodletting1). In my opinion, when a method has been used across many cultures over a very long period of time, that means there is something worth investigating and integrating, not mockingly dismissing as a false tool used by ignorant rubes;
2. We live in an era which has over-emphasized handing over one’s understanding of the world to third party so-called “experts”, which continues to intensify now with LLMs. The science of physiognomy justifies a return – at least in some sense – to listening to one’s intuition over that of listening to these so-called “experts”;
3. The flattening effects of modernity insist that everyone is exactly the same regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, etc. – we’re all just the same atomized widgets meant to feed the global capitalism system to the best of our abilities, with the same Starbucks, McDonalds and McMansion littering the landscape – except for all the -isms and -phobias out there, which prevent equality of outcome of all of these disparate groups. The science of physiognomy is maligned, just like human biodiversity (HBD) and astrology, precisely because it cuts against the underlying egalitarian beliefs permeating society – if astrology, HBD and physiognomy are true, then it means that people are fundamentally different and unequal in ways that can’t be “fixed” by society, and that must be denied at all costs. In other words, it is suppressed because of ideology and not due to science. This is why preeminent scientist2 Hans Eysenck covered both astrology and HBD in his own research – he was merely investigating the science wherever it led, and discovered there was something real to both. He was eviscerated for his HBD stance and his reputation smeared by far-leftist detractors after he died. I have a future post on him prepared.

The point of this post is to highlight Northcutt’s work as a practical exploration of what it feels like to apply physiognomy, and as a reflection on the tension between innate structure and personal agency. For the underlying science and framework of physiognomy, see the original post.

The Limits of Physiognomy

Now, there are a couple of things that Northcutt highlights briefly in his videos which I think are important. The frontier lies not just in rehearsing old knowledge of physiognomy – although those are very important ideas to spread among the broader public, which is fully ignorant – but in testing its limits. Consider three classes of alteration:

1. surface manipulations such as wigs, make-up, plastic surgery, the theater of appearances;
2. trauma and deformity such the scar, the accident, the surgical loss; and
3. deep plasticity such as epigenetics, aging, the slow reshaping of genes and physiognomy by diet, labor, or vice.

Regarding these points, people’s facial features change over time, highlighting that a person’s personality is not a static thing, it evolves depending on genetics and circumstances. Northcutt highlights at one point the importance of the nascent field of epigenetics – basically, we all have certain genes that may be turned on or off depending on lifestyle, behavior, outlook, etc. So while we are locked in to our physiognomy – you won’t be able to become Usain Bolt, Tom Brady or Tiger Woods no matter how much you train – there is still flexibility and freedom of choice, to an extent, within the limits of our physiognomy. The tension between fate versus free will is a rich question here.

Another great question is the relationship between the right side of the face with the left brain (representing the persona) and the left side of the face with the right brain (representing the Self), and the tension between these – the asymmetry between the sides of the face points to underlying tension between two “personalities” of the person, which is ultimately a very Jungian concept (ego vs. Self). Northcutt covers this point well. I am also interested in how something like plastic surgery (I think of Michael Jackson not just from the surgery but also from the skin bleaching), accidents resulting in deformity, or even something like wearing hairpieces (both for men and women) impact physiognomy results. Do these have an impact on underlying personality, are they a reflection of underlying personality trait (vanity, instability, immaturity), some combination, or something else? And in turn, to the extent we are locked into our physiognomy – with perhaps some flexibility via epigenetics – what does that say about this reality, about heaven and hell, and about the nature of God himself? Because while it is interesting to articulate and justify the science behind the judgments we make about others using our perception, the deeper metaphysics exploring what it says about this reality are ultimately more important.

The Videos

Anyway, here are a couple of Northcutt’s videos that stood out to me exploring the physiognomies of Gavin Newsom, J.D. Vance, Sam Hyde, and Mr. Beast. You can see more on his channel:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/GSvYdgAwLh4?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/M6Zd42qWUlY?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/47nUrDqySHE?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

I would also note that Northcutt himself has an interesting physiognomy – Armenian perhaps? [Update: has responded in the comments that he is a British-derived Atlanto-Mediterranid]. Certainly a magician phenotype, and I note his wider-set eyes, which apparently represents higher intelligence.3 He also offers certain subtle hints at various points, other than his coverage of Fuentes and Hitler, anyway, that he is familiar with the nomenclature of the dissident right, although his output is clearly and appropriately sanitized in accordance with YouTube guidelines.

Taylor, if you happen to read this, given you have been open to reader suggestions (and it appears you have struck a nerve, garnering hundreds of suggestions and comments in your videos), I’ll throw my hat in the ring a bit. I personally would be interested in seeing facial analysis of the following figures: Carl Jung, Barack Obama, Peter Thiel (I understand you covered him briefly, especially focusing on his ears), Michael Jackson (per above – how relevant is physiognomy after all this plastic surgery?), Phineas Gage (per above and here – how relevant is physiognomy after a major accident?), Benjamin Netanyahu, Rasputin, Andrew Jackson, Lee Kuan Yew, Montagu Norman (who engineered World War 2 on behalf of the central bank owners), Mayer Amschel Rothschild, and Paul Warburg. And for some fun, perhaps the changes to Mel Gibson’s face over time. I’d also be interested in the overlap between physiognomy and (quite obscure) clique theory, and also how it relates to astrology (such as elemental dominance between earth, water, air, and fire in the natal chart). Exploring physiognomy in relation to longevity would also be interesting, such as earlobe crease analysis (i.e. if you have a crease on your earlobe, your odds of dying younger go up significantly)…

Conclusion

Engaging physiognomy without succumbing to it is something like the mystic’s underworld journey: one descends into forbidden territory, resists the ruling spirits, extracts a fragment of illumination, and returns with faculties intact. Some who attempt this either won’t return – becoming permanent residents of the shadow, viewing physiognomy as a pure and fixed destiny with no free will whatsoever – or come back only with confirmations of what they already believed. The challenge is to touch the live wire without letting it burn out one’s capacity for judgment – to understand that physiognomy, like astrology, impacts and directs individual lives, but that there remains, somewhere inside, an element of choice, represented by the infinite Self. What matters also is not simply whether physiognomy is “true,” but what its very taboo reveals about the psychic structure of modernity – what our civilization has repressed in order to preserve its demand for an egalitarian future, and how that impacts each of our perspectives.

Thanks for reading, and see you all at the next.

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1 Though bloodletting was once considered a crude superstition, modern evidence (see biologist P.D. Mangan’s book Dumping Iron, his website here) suggests that controlled blood donation may confer real health benefits, particularly in reducing excess iron – he believes the reason women live four to five years longer on average than men is because they dump iron via menstruation, so if men dump iron too via blood donation they will receive similar health benefits. So, as with many ancient practices, there may be kernels of truth beneath what later generations dismiss as pseudoscience. His book is the reason why I regularly donate blood.

2 At the time of his death, Eysenck was the most frequently cited living psychologist in peer-reviewed scientific journal literature.

3 From the study “Assessing the accuracy of perceptions of intelligence based on heritable facial features”: “There was a significant association between perceived intelligence and measured IQ, but of the specific facial attributes only interpupillary distance (i.e., wide-set eyes) significantly mediated this relationship.”