This document provides guidance on describing a person's physical characteristics in 3 sentences or less. It discusses focusing on appearance, personality, and feelings. It describes how to concisely characterize someone's height, build, head, hair, face, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, skin, and hands. Key details to include are height, body type, hair color, eye shape and color, nose shape, smile, ear shape, skin tone or complexion, and hand size. Descriptions should avoid being rude and focus on neutral or positive terms.

1. Character
Description

2. When we descripe the character
We focus on .......
Personality Feelings
Appearance

3. The Appearance
We can describe
Body Hair
Face Eyes Nose
Mouth Ears skin Hand Head

4. The Body
The first thing to talk about is the body of the person. That means you
describe two things — the person’s height and their body shape/size.
DESCRIBE HEIGHT
When describing someone’s height there are only three ways we can do
it.
We can either say a person is tall, medium-height or short.
So essentially you can say three things to describe someone’s height:
He is tall
She is medium-height/He is average height
He is short

5. Short
Here we might say one of the following:
He is not very tall.
He is a little on the short side.
She is not that tall.
She is kind of petite.
SHORT
Tall
If someone is very tall we might say the
following:
He is a giant
He towers over other people

6. DESCRIBE BUILD
• 1-Big/Small
• 2-Fat/Thin
• Rather than say he is fat, we can say:
• He is a big guy
• He is overweight
• He is kind of big
• He is overweight
• He needs to lose weight
• He is obese
• We can say she is thin or slim
• Muscular , athletic ......

7. DESCRIBE HEAD
• If you say anything about a person’s head it could be
the following:
• He has a really big head
• He has a large head
• He has a big head
• Her head is kind of small
• She has a very small head
• Her head is small for her size
•

8. DESCRIBE HAIR
• Hair can come in many different colours:
• Brown
• Blonde
• Red
• Grey or White

9. DESCRIBE FACE
• After we describe someone’s general appearance in terms of
their body, we then begin to describe their face.
• We can describe a man as handsome or good-looking. A woman we
describe as beautiful or good-looking
• Sometimes people are ugly but it is rude to say this to someone’s face.
• People might use the following terms instead:
• He is not very good-looking
• He is not so handsome
• He is not blessed with good looks
• For someone that is neither good-looking or ugly, we might say
ordinary looking.
•

10. DESCRIBE EYES
She has beautiful eyes
• He has deep-set eyes (this is to describe a person who has
eyes that seem to be deeper in their face)
• She has big eyes
• He has clear eyes
• She is doe-eyed (we use this term to describe someone who
has big, child-like eyes. Someone who is doe-eyes often has
an innocent look about them)
• He has heavy eyes
• She has lidded eyes This is for someone who has heavy
eyelids, maybe they often look tired

11. • Beady-eyed — we use this to talk about someone who
has eyes that make someone look untrustworthy!
• Boss-eyed — if someone has eyes that look like they
are looking at two different things we use this
expression. It is a negative term.
• He has piggy eyes. it means someone had small
eyes

12. DESCRIBE NOSE
• Noses can be big, long or small.
• She has a long nose
• He has a big nose
• She has a small nose
• Sometimes people have a bump in the middle of their
nose. In which case we say: He has a bump in his nose.

13. DESCRIBE MOUTH
• Then we can talk about someone’s mouth.
• Mouths can be big, beautiful, small or wide.
• We often use the word smile to describe
someone’s mouth because we use our mouth to
smile.
• She has a big beautiful smile

14. DESCRIBE EARS
• Ears can be big or small.
• He has big ears
• He has very small ears
• Or the person’s ears might stick out from their head.
• He has sticky-out ears
• His ears stick out

15. Skin
• When talking about the colour of someone’s skin be
careful.
• People can be the following colours:
• White
• Black
• Brown

16. Pay Attention
• If someone has light-coloured skin, we do not say:
He is very white
• We say
• He has pale skin
• She is very pale-skinned
• She has a light complexion
If someone’s skin has a darker skin colour, we do not say
• He is very black
• He has dark skin
• He is very tanned
• He is has a dark complexion

17. DESCRIBE HANDS
• If we describe someone’s hands we might say they are either
big or small.
• He has big hands
• She has small hands
• But some people’s hands are very gentle and they might
have long fingers.
• We can say:
• She has long elegant fingers
• He has an artist’s hands — very soft and gentle
• We can describe the skin of someone’s hands
• She has soft hands
• He has coarse hands like a worker