Think you can judge a book by its cover? Pythagoras did. As early as 500 B.C, he was accepting students based on how gifted they looked. Even Aristotle wrote that large headed people were mean and people with broad faces were stupid. Was he right? Absolutely not.

But the now-debunked pseudoscience of Physiognomy persisted. In the 1600s, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta became known as an “expert” in the subject, conducting alchemical experiments in an attempt to boil down a person’s “pure essence”. In the 1800s, writer Johann Caspar Lavater published essays on physiognomy full of sweeping statements linking looks with personality.

The term ‘stuck up’ comes from this time, as people believed that someone with a nose bending upwards would possess a superiority complex.