Noses

I've noticed that most of the time poets describe a woman's face they leave her nose out of it. For example, Byron, in "She Walks in Beauty," describes the gal's cheeks and eyes and of course her smile. Shakespeare generally talks about his "woman"'s eyes and cheeks and lips, which is pretty conventional. Even the Song of Solomon, such a wonderfully diverse description, with lines like "Thy teeth are alike a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing, whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them," has pretty much nothing to say about the nose. I guess the conventional wisdom is that the best that can be hoped for in a woman's nose it that it go unnoticed.

Not so! A woman's nose is one of the places that her face becomes unique, that it really gets its character. If I may again be allowed to call attention to Scarlett Johansson:

This is not necessarily the best picture of her because she's not smiling, but it's advantageous because you can see her nose is, well, a little bulbous. It's part of what makes her so adorable, and, more than that, it makes her seem so real, so normal, so approachable, although I probably wouldn't dare. I guess the rumors are that she has had her nose done to make it a little smaller. These rumors are pretty ridiculous, in general, but I can't ever say for sure.

But it wasn't Scarlett's nose that made me think of this topic. I've been on kind of a nose kick lately, noticing a lot of attractive women with kind of off noses on the bus or whatnot. And I can't say exactly what it is about them that draws me to their faces, but I think the answer might be in the woman whose nose I really noticed, the one that kicked this whole thing off, I think.

Hanging around with (Dr.) Nog one evening we had a few beers and watched a grindhouse trailer compilation. One actress who did a lot of these ragged-edge productions was Christina Lindberg. Her most famous movie is They Call Her One Eye, which Tarantino referenced in Kill Bill. But she was also a Playmate, and really considered a great beauty for her day. Here's a picture of her that captures what, I think, made her affect me:

per my blog action day post, she's a, well, a natural woman. )cringe( Seriously, though, she's wearing mascara, and probably many other cosmetics, but look at her face. Not only her nose, which is obviously sizeable, but also the lines on her face, natural lines around her eyes and nose and mouth that make her face seem soft, like the petals of a flower just unfolded from inside the calyx. It's part of what made her such a great pick for exploitation films. She became an icon of corrupted innocence.

Consider this pic, as well:

Just natural beauty in soft light, beauty engrossed in beauty, looking at the flower, breathing its sweetness.

And this quality can transfer to other contexts as well. Consider this picture from Huge Real Boobs:

Although this pic, chosen partly to comply w/ my 70s PG self-rating, does not display the combination of her nose and smile that make her so winning, I hope you can see what they do. They make her seem real, and though I don't know whether her boobs are real or not (and I'm not sure "huge" is the size adjective I'd choose, either), I feel that they are, because I feel that she is real. Because of the imperfections of her nose.