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The psychology of the eyelids

"All the best cowboys have Chinese eyes"
--Pete Townshend, 1982 album-title [liner notes]

This page is to fill a gap, on the Web, by collecting links and images and ideas about the psychology of the eyelids.

From a robot-wisdom-y point of view, there's the very pressing issue of how to make the eyes expressive in computer animations. [intro] [many pix] [1997 panel] [toolkit] [faqs] [links] [background] [cartoony] (Eyelids don't seem to have gotten much specific attention.)

UPDATE: the movie "Final Fantasy" is taking cgi-eyelids to a new level-- see below #

Because of this expressiveness, many plastic surgeons choose to specialise in eyelid reconstruction: [searchpattern] Warning: the photos on their webpages are generally creepy. [image search] [eg Salman Rushdie]

Eye makeup tries to exaggerate the most attractive natural eyelid-patterns. [tips] [tricks] [lid-specific] (These pages were not written for, and will probably be incomprehensible to, computer programmers, sorry.)

eyelid politics

"When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight." [cite]

But even more, the eyelids are a very poorly understood microcosm of the ongoing 'world battle' between life-affirming personalities and life-deadening personalities: 'chinese eyes' refers to a special look of compassion conveyed by the eyelids, that represents a very high human ideal.

But all the varieties of compassion-failure also show up in the subtle curves of people's eyelids-- lizard gazes, haunted paranoia, deadened feeling... [Request: I need lots of artful example-images, if you can recommend some-- use the Google-search here and the suggestion-box down below.]

Or browse these celebrity galleries: female male

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive.
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.

Gina Gershon:

Drew Barrymore:

Mona Lisa: [info]

Mr Rogers:

Rachel Olsen:

Paul McCartney:

Nancy Reagan:

Judy Garland:

Katie Couric:

Sarah Michelle Gellar:

Christina Applegate:

Katie Holmes:

Lauren Bacall:

Liv Tyler:

Kate Moss:

Renee Zellweger: [source]

Annette Bening: [source]

Lisa Kudrow:

Lucy Liu:

Gwyneth Paltrow:

Calista Flockhart:

random babies:

Meg Ryan:

Jimmy Carter:

Susan Sarandon:

Ringo Starr:

Sigourney Weaver:

Bette Davis:

Marlene Dietrich:

Robert Mitchum:

Nicholas Cage:

George Clooney:

Elvis Presley:

John Lennon:

Bob Dylan:

Leo DiCaprio:

Jennifer Tilly:

James Coburn:

Paul Newman:

Tom Hanks:

Pierce Brosnan:

Christy Turlington:

Russell Crowe:

Clint Eastwood:

Dennis Hopper:

Lou Reed:

Tim Roth:

Steve Buscemi:

Kid Rock:

John Turturro:

baby orangutan:

Parisian (1940):

James Woods (mugging):

Afghan refugee (1985):
(The second copy is very clumsily simplified to test the importance of iris-color and pupil-size; the third is the same woman 17 years later.)

Paula Poundstone (perp walk): [full pic]

Tim McVeigh (perp walk):

Unabomber (booking, and recent):

Bhagwan Rajneesh:

J. Krishnamurti:

Yoda: [info]

Action Man (Sat am toon): [info] ditto

Shrek: [info] [source]

Final Fantasy: [info] [source]

(The most detailed ones here are handcrafted more than algorithmically generated, but they did model multiple eye-muscles under semitransparent skin. Also, I'm a bit suspicious about the third one really being cgi.)

eyelid therapy

And finally, surprisingly, because the aforementioned 'world-battle' attacks us partly around our eyes, I want to recommend an experimental 'eye meditation' that I first read about way-back-when in Orson Bean's 1971 Me and the Orgone. [extract] [Amazon] [exercises]

At the simplest level, this meditation just involves rolling your eyes a full 360 degrees... but as you do it, try to be very sensitive to the subtle resistances you'll find at different points in the roll-- areas where a pressure seems to be coming from outside and limiting the smooth, continuous flowing of your attention.

I'd suggest these resistance-points can be used for 'leverage' in repelling attacks against your own compassion-- but you have to devote time and attention to making peace with the resisting pressure.

So when you're rolling your eyes and you encounter resistance, don't just force your eye past it-- pause and try making very slight movements in various directions, to find the 'shape' of the resistance-- as if you're using your eyes to gently massage the tension away.

misc

Teaching computers to recognize faces and expressions [links&pix]

[reading character]

Nonverbal Dictionary: Givens

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