Ever wonder what your facial features reveal? Or tried to gauge another individual based on appearance? Rose Rosetree has studied the art of physiognomy or face reading, as it is more commonly referred to, for 20 years. Before you dismiss face reading as nothing more than a fortune-telling fad, you might want to consider that Rosetree's services (http://www.roserosetree.com/ ) have been enlisted by numerous companies including USA Today and Freddie Mac. She also teaches a face reading course and has authored eight books on the subject. I recently caught up with Rosetree on the phone to find out a little more about her skill.

So, what is face reading and how did you get your start?

Face reading is reading faces for character, not for expression. It has a 5,000 year-long history; it's as old as acupuncture. And I began it as a hobby in 1975 and turned pro in 1986, about four years after I moved to the Washington, D.C., area.

How does one turn pro?

[Laughs.] Well, I started teaching it, and I wrote my first book about it which was published in 1989, and I started charging people for face reading sessions.

How much do you charge for a face reading and how long does it take?

It's $125 and it takes 55 minutes. And that's only the highlights. Sometimes people come back for different types of readings.

You know the old adage, "You can't judge a book by its cover"? Is face reading saying, yes, you can?

What it's saying is, if you are illiterate you will have no ability to find the quality information from that book cover. Face reading is a form of literacy and -- at the risk of saying something shocking to most people in D.C., sophisticated as we think we are -- most of us are illiterate about this language of the face.

Are a person's eyes really a window to his or her soul?

Your eyes are only one of the windows of the soul. In face reading, every feature of your face is a window of the soul. It's like when you see the advent calendars with Santa Claus and behind every picture you open up the door and out comes the candy? Well, that's how a face is. Every part of your face is like one of those doors and the candy is the information about who that person really is. You can learn more about a person from a good picture or 10 minutes of face reading than you could in six weeks of dating.

Are there insights that you can garner from stereotypical features, like a pointy chin or a round face?

No, I'm so glad you asked that because it's the opposite. We all want the quick stereotype. How often have you gone to an event, a job interview and the person gives one quick look at you and gives you the gong. It has happened to most of us. It's painful if someone doesn't like the color of your skin or your hair or eyes. Someone has used the stereotype -- not pretty enough, not handsome enough -- and the person doesn't see you after making a judgment like that.

What's something that a reader might be able to glean by looking at a person's mouth?

How often have you heard that your sexiness is directly proportionate to the fullness of your lips? A face reader would say what lip fullness is about is personal comfort with self-disclosure. And what I mean by that is people who have fuller lips are relatively comfortable at talking about things that are personal: my feelings; the traumas of my childhood; my religious experiences, you name it.

Can you still read a person if they have a face-lift, Botox or a nose job?

What face readers have said for the past 5,000 years is that there's a reciprocal relationship between the person and the physical face. So if you change one then you change the other. Most of us evolve because we grow on the inside and then our faces change on the outside. But if you change your face on the outside then you are going to change on the inside.

Can we play a game where you look at a picture of a celebrity and see what you can tell me?

Sure. I'm near the Internet so I can just pull up their images.

Okay, let's start with Angelina Jolie.

She's got the movie star philtrum. There's a part of the face that's about sexiness and people don't even know what it's called, how funny is that? . . . There's one part of the face that is specifically about sex and it is spelled p-h-i-l-t-r-u-m. This is over the lip -- the place between the nose and the mouth. Now what [Jolie] has on a scale from one to 10, checking out her philtrum definition, those two ridges that go from the nose to the mouth, she's got a 10. . . . The philtrum is about sex appeal and she does have extreme sex appeal.

I like your assessment. Let's move on to the next one: Jennifer Aniston.

Well, let's look at her philtrum since we are talking about Angelina. [Aniston] is only an eight, but it's a lot deeper.

So what does that mean?

You can learn a lot about someone's sexual appetite by reading a philtrum, not just sex appeal. So having that extreme depth to her philtrum suggests that she takes an uncommon amount of pleasure in sexuality, in being with her partner -- that it's a very important thing to her.

Let's move on to a big question. How can I tell by someone's face if they are an honest person?

One aspect to look at is to see if the person has a crooked smile or the person's mouth has physically moved way over to the right side of the face. That means the speech of the person is intended for public consumption and has much less personal relevance or truth. It's a bad sign and you can experiment by trying to talk out of that side of your mouth.

So is there any way to beat the face reading system?

[Laughs.] No. You can't. That's why deeper perception is catching on. It's very empowering.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company