WE like people who look us straight in the eye and generally look up to people with strong jaws. A face can launch a thousand ships or be the route to a fortune. And deals can be won or lost by a single look.
These old sayings have more than a grain of truth in them, says author Lailan Young, whose latest book, The Naked Face: The Essential Guide to Reading Faces, tells you how to read the characters of the people you know and those you don't. Face reading is an art that has been practised by the Chinese for thousands of years. In the West it started with the ancient Greeks and included practitioners such as Aristotle and Plato. By the time of imperial Rome, it was an established profession.
Now it is making a comeback. Hong Kong magnates take the subject so seriously that face readers are asked to sit in on contract negotiations: if the face reader says 'don't sign', the contract is left on the table. On the other side of the world, French head-hunting agencies use the techniques contained in Ms Young's book to choose between candidates.
'Face reading works across all nations and all ethnic groups,' says Ms Young, who is half-Chinese. 'Every face in every race is made up of the same component parts and a reading is just the sum of those parts.
'Some Chinese, for example, have flatter and broader noses than Caucasians but among all Chinese there are some whose noses which are wider and flatter than average and some whose noses are smaller. You learn to take into account the racial differences.
'It's an art, not a science, and accuracy comes with practice and understanding - but once you've got the basics you can tell a lot about a person, if they're the jealous sort, intelligent or understanding, just by looking at them. And you can even see if they've got criminal tendencies.' Face reading is now being taken seriously in the most unlikely of places - including Britain's police headquarters, Scotland Yard. 'Charing Cross and Westminster Hospital Medical Schools in London are now working with the police to establish a facial identification centre, after having found that everyone's ears are unique,' says Ms Young.
'In a recent case, a bank robber was jailed after committing a crime 10? years earlier. He had been wearing a mask but the bank's video machine clearly recorded his ears. They found ear prints were as accurate as fingerprints and he was convicted.