How To Describe Noses, Mouths, Legs, and more

Can you describe body parts without being boring?

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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Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com and TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, Technology in Education featured blogger, and IMS tech expert. She is  the editor of a K-6 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-6 Digital Citizenship curriculum, creator of technology training books for middle school and ebooks on technology in education. Currently, she’s editing a thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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