Expression through personal image was of utmost importance for primitive man. There is no standardization of personal image in primitive people. This only appeared at the time of the pharaohs in ancient Egypt and was adopted as a means of submission in the feudal regimes. Visagism is the rescue of the expression through personal image, so it is not something new, that someone created. It is an art.

The term visagisme, a word derived from visage, which in French means face, was created by Fernand Aubry in 1937. Fernand Aubry never published a book or defined the concept of Visagism. There are some fragments of his make-up lessons and some phrases, which show that he thought that the beauty professional needed to think about more than creating a harmonic and visually balanced image; he said that he needed to express a personality. He did not bequeath any method to achieve this, a fact that made it difficult for other hairdressers and make-up artists to apply this objective, and which led to a series of misrepresentations over the following years.

Prior to Aubry, there were a number of events, which were instrumental in the emergence of Visagism. There were huge social and economic changes, which resulted in the end of the nobility and the emergence of the middle class, and the beginning of opposition to the ruling class. In addition, a major revolution in the arts and design was underway.

At the end of the 19th century, the architect Louis Sullivan established a concept that radically changed architecture and all the other applied arts. That concept is summed up in his famous phrase "form always follows function." In 1918, the Bauhaus school of arts was founded on this principle, by Walter Gropius and an influential group of artists, and its teachings definitively changed the entire field of visual arts, from Fine Arts to Design.

This phrase means that before thinking about what will be beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, you have to think about what or who the image is for. There are beautiful but uncomfortable houses, beautiful but not functional offices. There are cups that are beautiful but difficult to hold. And we see beautiful cuts and hairstyles, which, even though they make the person look beautiful, are not suitable. For example, a young doctor may look beautiful with flowing hair, but she will not have much confidence in her competence.

When you think of the function first, the function will determine how the image should be created, to be appropriate while still being beautiful. While all other visual applied arts followed the concept of Louis Sullivan and the Bauhaus, the art of creating a personal image went against the grain. Moreover, in most of the courses that appeared for make-up artists and hair stylists, only the techniques were taught, and some essential information was missing, especially about visual language. Visagism, consequently, ended up becoming merely a technique to harmonise face shape and skin tone with hair and make-up. Instead of personalising the image and creating a personality, the opposite occurred, standardising and mischaracterising people.

Many people, over the last 75 years, were responsible for the strengthening of visagism. The artist and Bauhaus professor Johannes Itten, creator of the Color Star colour system, discovered that there was a relationship between the colours his students used and their skin colour. He noticed that each student painted with a certain colour more than another and that this colour resembled the colour of their skin. For example, those who painted with warm colours had a warm skin tone.

This led Robert Dorr to create the Color Key System, which revolutionised the cosmetics industry by classifying skins into warm or cool. Suzanne Caygill (1911-1994) did the most in-depth research on skin colours, identifying thirty-two types, in the 1940s and created the Suzanne Caygill Academy of Color and wrote Color: The Essence of You (Celestial Arts, Millbrae USA,1980), unfortunately out of print. To simplify the use of colour and identify skin type, skins have since been classified into four "seasons": spring, summer, autumn, and winter, as Berenice Kentner's book Color Me A Season explains.

The person who most spread the concept of visagism in recent years was Claude Juillard, co-author of the book Formes et Couleurs (Solar, Paris, 1999), with Brigitte Gautier, but before him, several other people have dedicated themselves to keeping this concept alive.

However, the teaching of visagism has been restricted to the identification of face shapes (formes) and skin tones (couleurs), subject of all the books I found when researching the subject for my book, including Juillard's, in which he also did not define the concept of Visagism. Visual language and personality analysis are approached in an intuitive way and, unfortunately, there is a tendency to standardise solutions. I have had access to several handouts from visagism courses that set rules, when investigating solutions. (For example, they declare: on a rectangular or square face, you should never use vertical or horizontal lines.) This reveals that they continue to approach the construction of personal image exclusively through aesthetics (the form), without the analysis of function, which frames visagism as an academic practice. No method included a consultancy to discover what the client wishes to express. Therefore, many see visagism as an academic practice and therefore reject it.

My book, Visagismo: harmonia e estética (Ed. Senac SP, 2003) is the first to show how this language is applied to the art of creating a personal image. With this knowledge, the professional has more freedom to create, because he no longer depends solely on his intuition and visual intelligence. For me, visagism is a concept, which can only be applied with a deep knowledge of visual language, knowing how to analyse both physical characteristics (face shapes, skin tones and features) and personality, and freeing up creativity, without being bound by formulas or rules.

The books Visagismo: harmonia e estética and Visagismo Integrado: identidade, estilo e beleza (Ed. Senac SP, 2009) are still the only ones in the world that approach Visagismo this way. They establish the bases of individualization of personal image according to personality, lifestyle, social position, and physical characteristics. It explains how visual language works, how to understand what an image expresses and how to identify a person's physical characteristics. The second book also explains how to interpret what lines, shapes and colours express and how to conduct a consultancy to establish what the client wishes to express.

These books form the basis of all the superior courses in Visagism that have appeared since 2007 in Brazil and have been used in hundreds of TCCs of students in the institutions. Philip Hallawell Visagism has also been the subject of post-graduate monographs in various areas, such as Dr. Luciana Macedo's application of Philip Hallawell Visagism in Cosmiatry.

In 2017, Dr. Patrícia Alencar conducted scientific research in the area of Behavioural Psychology, with more than one thousand people, using Philip Hallawell Visagism, which the Institute of Psychology and the Hospital das Clínicas of the University of São Paulo and the Ministry of Health of Brazil accepted as the scientific basis of the research. It proved that people react in a standardised way to images of people.

This method was created from the association of knowledge from four scientific study areas: visual language, psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology. In the area of psychology, it includes the theory of archetypal symbols, by psychologist Carl Jung, studies on identity, personality and temperament, and techniques of induction to reflection and creation of concepts, developed to stimulate creativity. The identification of archetypal symbols in the structures of the personal image - in the face of the features and the shape of the hair and in the lines which make up the features of the face and the hair - allows one to make a reading of what the personal image as a whole expresses and what the face reveals of the temperament. Works in the area of cognitive science, seen in the light of this perception, indicate that images provoke emotional reactions before they can be rationally analysed, which explains why personal image has so much influence on self-esteem, behaviour, psychological and emotional state and on relationships with other people.

The visagista, who works with my method, uses this reading to consult and help his client to establish an intention for his image.

Professionals from various areas can use this method and apply visagism in their work. This already happens in aesthetic dentistry, aesthetic medicine, fashion, interior design and architecture, work psychology and team management.

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