This little middle-English word – meaning outward appearance – how it dominates our lives.

I have an ongoing Facebook bottom debate with my friend Wendy. We vie for whose is biggest and most out of control. I doubt we will ever agree.

I rarely quote from the work of Walt, but there’s a moment in that wonderful animation, The Incredibles.

It’s a family of superheroes. Clever, really, because we immediately batten our own identity onto our corresponding super.

Mum Helen Parr is just fabulous. She has been gifted the voice of Holly Hunter, soft and lyrical and so clever.

She used to be the best of the superheroes, fearless Elastigirl, quickfire and without equal. While she wooed her husband, she also beat him to the criminals.

Marriage and children does to her what is does to so many women: they remain a hero but become invisible. No-one sees the miracles they are achieving, because their nails are bitten and make up only goes on on high days and holidays.

Their appearance belies their special powers.

So it is with Helen. She settles into the chaos of motherhood and becomes, in the eyes of all around her, ordinary.

Right up to the moment her husband is caught up in a sticky Super situation.

She calls in a favour, cadges a jet, and hires a babysitter. And piloting the jet, she sets off to rescue her husband right back.

There is a moment when she finds the secret fantasy island and makes her way inside the Bondesque volcano. She is walking along a corridor of mirrors.

For a second there, she turns and looks at her reflected rear. And sighs wistfully.

Our visage: the way we express, and move, and look: it is so important to us. And it dictates how others see us, make no mistake about it.

Professor Albert Mehrabian is Professor Emeritus of Psychology, UCLA. He has spent around 50 years looking at the way we human beings communicate feelings and attitudes.

I had better tread carefully here. The statistics cited in his seminal piece of research, “Silent messages: Implicit communication of emotions and attitudes”(1981), simplifies the business of communicating feelings and attitudes to data, and those who use the resulting statistics  are often critisised for framing them inaccurately.

But they show how the visage- the appearance, the ‘the conscious and unconscious movements and postures by which attitudes and feelings are communicated’ (Oxford Dictionary) can dominate someone else’s first impressions.

The study concludes that only 7% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in the words that are spoken.

Conversely, 38% of that message is paralinguistic – it is communicated in the way the words are said; and 55%  is carried in our facial expression.

The evidence of our eyes and ears dominates the words we say.

A certain Mr Gray found a way to subvert that very evidence, and confound the very passage of time.

Oscar Wilde’s sophisticated Adonis, Dorian Gray, is a parable, told superbly by one of the most compassionate writers I have ever known. Wilde’s wit is legendary, but I find his wisdom eternal.

Dorian Gray is a stunning young man who holds all in his thrall. One day, an artist paints a portrait which is his visage: not just what he looks like, but who he is.

Dorian that day stands at a crossroads. He tosses out a wish that the portrait should carry the weight of everything he does, all the decisions of his life.

And then he proceeds to lead a wicked life. He finds the most promising and innocent of lives and finds pleasure in ruining them. He betrays, murders and drives others to suicide.

It is not Dorian who shows on his outward visage the scars of this evil, but his portrait, locked up there in his attic. True, it grows older. But it also shows, in stark visual form, what real evil can do to someone.

All his life Dorian escapes detection. He even tells one little village girl that he is truly wicked, and she says he cannot be because only old people can be wicked.

It is only when he dies that he and the portrait change places once more, and his body can only be identified by the rings on his wizened hands.

My husband had his hair cut the other day. He transformed overnight from Radovan Karadzic to George Clooney. I am not shallow, but it did make a difference.

Similarly, I have begun to be somewhat of a cyber-Robinson Crusoe, marooned on my cyberisland with myself for company. While I have not grown a long dishevelled beard- that would be preposterous- my visage has changed radically.

If Phil can get his hair cut then I can paint my toenails.

So today, they are bright pink and I have hired a jet to take me off the island for at least 22 hours of every day.

But there is another visage I need to take care of. And it is barely human.

This site has looked the same since I started it, way back in those balmy Summer holidays. It has served me well but I do get irritated when I have to find my way to earlier posts, clicking back arrows and suchlike.

And , like any woman, I just feel the need for a change.

So, as with any new make up and accessories, the next few days might get a bit experimental. I’ve picked out a red dress, but I have to make sure I have somewhere to stash all those necessities like past posts, an RSS feed and my beloved photographs.

I’ll look a bit different, but if it’s any consolation, my bottom will be the same size, and I can guarantee you I have no portraits sitting up there in my dusty attic.