Seeing Faces in Unlikely Places

A very evocative set of pruners sends me down a fun rabbit hole.

Yesterday I wrote about taking some ivy trimmings from my family’s cemetery plot. The pruners I used to cut the ivy are shown above. They’re not mine — I couldn’t find my own pruners in the basement, so I borrowed my landlord’s set. They’re handy and effective, but what I really like about them is that they look like the head of a bird. The blades function as the beak, the small bolt at the base of the handle looks like an eye, and the hole in the upper blade even looks like a nostril!

The visual effect is arguably even better when the bird’s beak is open:

I’ve always noticed faces like this, whether in nature (tree bark, wood grain, flowers) or in manufactured items (wall sockets, cars, faucets). When I was little, there was a small stain on the molding of my bedroom wall that I thought looked like a guy with a big, flowing beard, although my childhood friends thought I was nuts when I pointed it out to them.

But pruners and trimmers have always been my favorite source of found faces, because they tend to have readymade mouths and eyes. The ones with curved blades are particularly expressive — they have cartoonishly self-satisfied grins. Here’s a representative sampling (these and all remaining photos in this post were found on the internet):