What Your Face Has Always Been Trying to Tell You

When I became a Fashion Feng Shui® Facilitator, I thought I had found the framework I had been looking for my whole professional life. The Five Elements - Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal - gave me a language for what I had always sensed but could never quite name: that every person carries a distinctive energy, and that when your outer expression aligns with that energy, something shifts.

What I didn’t expect was that becoming an FFS Facilitator would be the beginning, not the destination.

A Journey That Started Long Before Fashion Feng Shui®

My interest in understanding people through their personal energy actually began in 1999, when I had the opportunity to study colour and style in Aberdeen, Scotland. That experience was a revelation for me. The idea that a person’s colour energies could reveal so much about their character stayed with me for years. The wise words of my teacher then still ring in my ears today.

When I discovered Fashion Feng Shui® and eventually trained as a Master Facilitator, those early threads finally came together. The Five Elements framework gave structure and depth to everything I had been observing across years of working with clients. I understood their natural motivations, communication styles, and the environments in which they truly thrived.

But the more I worked with the elements, the more I wanted to understand them at a deeper level. I kept asking myself: where else does elemental energy reveal itself? Where else can we read who someone truly is?

The answer came through the work of Jean Haner.

Discovering Mian Xiang: The Art of Chinese Face Reading

About ten years ago, I travelled to California to study with Jean Haner and learn the ancient Chinese practice of Mian Xiang, or face reading. What I discovered transformed the way I see my clients entirely. 

Chinese face reading has existed for thousands of years, rooted in the same philosophical foundation as acupuncture and feng shui: the flow of Qi, the balance of yin and yang, and the wisdom of the Five Elements. Just as Fashion Feng Shui® teaches that our clothing and environment reflect our inner energy, face reading teaches that our features, including their shape, proportion, symmetry, and condition, are a blueprint of our personality, our experiences, and our life path.

For someone already fluent in elemental language, it was like learning to read in a second language that shared the same root. Everything I knew about the Five Elements applied here too, but now written in the features of the face rather than in the clothes on someone’s back.

What Face Reading Adds to Fashion Feng Shui®

 In a Fashion Feng Shui® consultation, we explore a client’s elemental essence through their relationship with colour, style, and personal energy. Face reading adds another layer of confirmation and depth to that process.

When I observe a client’s face, I can see their elemental blueprint expressed in their features. A long, rectangular face with a strong, straight nose often reflects Wood energy and the drive to grow, to move forward, to achieve. A heart-shaped face with a wide forehead and narrower chin may speak to Fire energy of enthusiasm, passion, and a gift for connection. Earth energy often shows in a broad, square face with a strong jaw. Metal energy in well-defined, symmetrical features. Water energy in softer, rounder contours.

These are not rigid categories, as most people carry a blend of elements: a dominant energy with the influence of others woven through. But seeing those patterns in the face, alongside what a client gravitates toward in their wardrobe and environment, creates a remarkably full picture of who someone truly is.

What moves me most about this work is how often a client will sit across from me and feel genuinely seen, not because I told them something they didn’t know, but because I gave language to something they had always felt. That is what the elemental framework does, whether it expresses itself through fashion, through feng shui, or through the features of the face.

What This Means for Your Practice

If you are an FFS Facilitator, I want to encourage you to stay curious about where elemental wisdom shows up beyond style and clothing. The Five Elements are not a styling tool, they’re a framework for understanding the full human being. Face reading is one of the most profound expansions of that framework I have found in more than two decades of this work.

Jean Haner’s book The Wisdom of Your Face is a wonderful place to begin. And if you ever have the opportunity to study with a practitioner trained in Mian Xiang, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The more fluently we can read elemental energy, in colour, in style, in environment, and yes, in the face, the more powerfully we can serve the people who come to us to be truly seen.

Geraldine Wijsbeek | Fashion Feng Shui® Master Facilitator | The Netherlands | Instagram @completely_in_your_element