How To Describe a Fascinating Character

I got a lot of feedback on my post on physical descriptors for characters, A Nose by Any Other Name. Here are a few more that will jog your inspiration:

Face

• Brush of make-up and light touch of lipstick

Mouth, neck and chin

• Square chin
• Strong chin
• hanging jowls
• slack, hanging mouth
• long neck
• Adam’s apple
• Neck muscles were drumhead tight
• Beard gone to white
• Thick brown mustache gone to gray

Legs, feet

• bowlegged
• twig-like calves
• Pink toenails
• lateral displacement of the big toe bunions
• nails bitten and dirty
• thickened yellow nails

Hands, fingers

• fingers as thick as sausage—sausage fingers
• lighter patch of skin on third finger
• nicotine stains between the first and second finger of his left hand
• wrist cords bulged like roots of oak

Head

• Bald spot on top
• Bushy eyebrows
• eyebrows of white steel wool
• wore a ballcap
• a single bushy bar above the eyes

Hair

• Corn silk hair
• Blue-black hair
• shoulder-length silver hair with a jaunty clip, dark rimmed glasses, smooth unlined face
• Blonde hair trimmed close to the scalp
• Shaggy white hair
• Teased platinum hair
• Hair in a neat ponytail
• Unruly shock of prematurely white hair
• Cowlick
• bad case of dandruff
• light brushcut hair
• clipped her hair back in its usual twist
• salt-and-pepper hair was wet and freshly combed
• Hair tied in a severe school-marmish bun
• Hair a light sandy brown

Skin

• rashes
• Beauty marks
• tattoo of…
• lentigo
• Leathery skin
• Spongy skin
• Steroidal with bad skin
• Walnut dark skin that glowed
• Brush of make-up and light touch of lipstick
• Dimple

Multiple

• The pale curve of her slender neck and the way her long dark hair draped down her back
• looked like hell—purple bags under her eyes, fingernails bitten to the nub

Body

• Thickening at the waist

Shoulders, chest

• Big slope-shouldered man
• Wide sloping shoulders
• broad shouldered
• Plump shoulders
• Bowed back
• Burly man with shoulders like a ledge
• Ramrod straight and rock-jawed, with gunmetal eyes and shoulders that seemed mitered at perfect ninety-degree angles
• Tall and thin and wearing her hair shorter than the last time I’d seen her

Miscellaneous

• Comfortable looking 60
• lissome body
• Wolfish boy
• Solidly built
• Chubby, pear-shaped man
• Rail thin
• Muscle-bound
• lean muscular build
• Almost fat, always slovenly dressed
• he was taller than he looked and bigger
• Nearly mythic ugliness
• Imposing nearly to the point of intimidation
• A hundred pounds overweight with an orange streak in her hair
• handsome but certainly not memorable
• Pushing seventy
• Fit looking man in a tattered straw cowboy hat jammed atop his sun-bleached blond hair
• Heavy-boned farm boy
• Short, overweight black woman
• Big guy, white, maybe forty. Black hair. Wide neck
• Thick man with shabby hair
• Talk, spike-straight guy with a pinched face
• Medium height, pale, stick-thin and leggy with a gamin face under a layered mass of long black hair

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