Eyebrows Interpreted by Wrinkles.

When one comes to the interpreta­tion of the curious shapes taken by these hairs one is not left to inference, for Nature has put some indelible stamps on the forehead and round the orbits of the men examined. These are wrinkles which have been long in prepara­tion and only begin to show themselves fully when the “evil days” have come, in the ’fifties, ’sixties and ’seventies.

I will describe the wrinkles first, and then their results, with examples, in the numerous fashions of the hairs. Wrinkles are of two kinds, pathological and physiological, in other words the former are the results of degenera­tion and wasting of the subcutaneous fat and loss of its normal elasticity, and are found in the faces of nearly all men and women, with advancing age, and they are the subject of much distress in the fair sex and a good deal of “beauty doctoring.” The latter are the result of long-continued and repeated action of certain small muscles. The former are numerous, shallow and fine, the latter few and comparatively deep. The difference between elderly women and men in respect of the projecting hairs is not that men have many more physiological wrinkles, but that the hairs of women in this region do not stiffen and grow long nearly so much as those of men.

There are three groups of wrinkles found on the human forehead and face, vertical, arched or horizontal and orbital. This division of wrinkles is a natural one, for each group is produced by the action of different muscles, the vertical by the corrugator muscle, which is a narrow band passing from under the frontalis muscle inwards, where it is attached to the bone between the two eyebrows; the arched by the action of the frontalis muscle, one which moves the scalp and in doing so elevates the eyebrows; the orbital by the elliptic orbicularis muscle which closes the eyelids. These muscles are shown in Fig. [20].

Vertical wrinkles are found in the central region of the forehead and sometimes occupy the middle line with a deep furrow, more often they are bilateral and symmetrical, near the inner fourth part of the eyebrow, and sometimes they are placed at different distances from the middle line.

Arched wrinkles extend over the forehead in a series of lines which are usually concentric with the curve of the eyebrows, but are sometimes nearly horizontal.

Orbital wrinkles may lie in a radiating plan all round the outer lower and inner borders of the orbit, and in some persons they are found lying over the curves of the orbicularis muscle itself.