Although the effort was launched by the clothing industry to better understand the modern French physiognomy, the campaign has also become a way to remind the populace of their true size.

NPR: Rabid Reader: 'Fat Land' and U.S. Supersizing

For years physiognomy the idea that a person's face is a reflection of his character was sneered at.

ECONOMIST: Physiognomy and economics

For much of the 20th century, Mr Hirschfeld's drawings were there to be savoured in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, where one's appreciation of his gift for spearing a performer's physiognomy co-existed with a weekly hunt for the Ninas that is to say, the number of times Mr Hirschfeld had the name Nina embedded in almost every drawing, as a tribute to his only child.

ECONOMIST: London is the place to see Al Hirschfeld

He argued that film editing was a kind of pictographic syntax, that in acting physiognomy was more important than psychology, and that the sound and colour design in a film should be treated as fully expressive elements in their own right.

ECONOMIST: Film��s great might-have-been

But its second observation is that, so far as can be determined, the traditional definition of race the tendency of people living in different parts of the world to have different skin colour, hair colour and physiognomy has no wider ramifications in areas such as intelligence.

ECONOMIST: Darwinism