Holiday Calendar

National Big Forehead Day

Next celebratedTuesday, August 3, 2027

There is no anatomical standard for a big forehead. Clinical anatomy calls the hairline an unstable landmark, set by sex, age, family, culture and fashion, so National Big Forehead Day celebrates a feature nobody can measure.

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Last updated September 5, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEAugust 3
OBSERVED INUnited States
CATEGORYFun
SUBCATEGORYSilly
ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY
Not documented
FIRST OBSERVED
Not documented
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

It circulates on its own.

National Big Forehead Day travels through holiday listings and social posts each 3 August without a campaign behind it, and a search of federal proclamation and resolution records returned nothing. No founding entity, inception year or establishing act has been identified.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday
INTRO

England's 1598 verdict on reading faces

In 1598, English law had a name for anyone who claimed to read a person's character from their face. The name was vagabond. National Big Forehead Day sits at the far end of that history.

An Act of Elizabeth I's parliament listed people "fayning themselues to haue knowledge in Physiognomie" beside palmists, jugglers, and pedlars. All of them were to be judged rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars. The penalty was a public whipping.

Four centuries of face reading followed. The forehead had its own place in it, first in fashion and later in the reading of skulls.

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ORIGINS

Big Forehead Day history

INTRODUCTION

The forehead is one of the newer things about the human face. The Smithsonian's Human Origins Program describes the modern skull as thin-walled and high vaulted, with a flat and near vertical forehead. Earlier humans did not have one.

What they had was a browridge. Where it went, and why, is still being argued.

CHAPTER 01

Shaving a browridge back in software

Researchers at the University of York rebuilt Kabwe 1 on a computer. It is an archaic human cranium held by the Natural History Museum. They cut the browridge back and found that the heavy brow offered no spatial advantage.

Chewing told the same story. Simulated biting put very little strain on the ridge, and removing it changed nothing about how the face handled a bite.

So the team proposed something else, and hedged it. Lead author Ricardo Godinho said they "suggest a plausible contributing explanation can be found in social communication," since a flatter brow frees the eyebrows to move. York calls the paper a contribution to a long-running academic debate, not a verdict.

CHAPTER 02

A face you could arrange

By the 1400s a high forehead was something a woman could have made. The National Gallery of Art records that the sitter in Rogier van der Weyden's Portrait of a Lady wears severely plucked eyebrows and hairline, in the style of highly placed ladies of the Burgundian court.

Two centuries after the Elizabethan act, physiognomy was being printed by a major London house. The Wellcome Collection holds Henry Hunter's English edition of Lavater's Essays on physiognomy, published by John Murray. One of its plates is captioned "the drunkard."

CHAPTER 03

The skull, then the audit

Franz Joseph Gall read the skull rather than the face. The Science Museum Group records that Austria banned his Vienna lectures on cranioscopy in 1802, after religious leaders objected. James DeVille made a plaster phrenological head of him in London in 1823.

In 1924, psychology tested whether character could be judged from external physical criteria. Cleeton and Knight published "Validity of Character Judgments Based on External Criteria" in the Journal of Applied Psychology, a paper the APA's index shows cited 49 times.

National Big Forehead Day has none of that paper trail. No founder, organization, or registrar is on record for it. People observe it anyway.

TIMELINE

Timeline

A plucked hairline at court

Rogier van der Weyden painted an unidentified sitter whose eyebrows and hairline were severely plucked, in the style of the Burgundian court.

Face readers ruled vagabonds

An Elizabethan act placed anyone claiming knowledge of physiognomy among rogues and sturdy beggars, punishable by public whipping.

Lavater printed in London

John Murray began publishing Henry Hunter's English edition of Lavater's Essays on physiognomy.

Austria bans Gall's lectures

The Austrian government shut down Franz Joseph Gall's Vienna lecture series on cranioscopy after religious leaders objected.

Phrenology cast in plaster

James DeVille made a plaster phrenological head of Gall in London, now held by the Science Museum Group.

Character judgments put to test

Cleeton and Knight published a study of character judgments made from external physical criteria in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why National Big Forehead Day Matters

ANATOMY

Anatomy puts no fixed line at the top of a forehead.

A forehead is bounded at the bottom by the brows and at the top by the hairline, and clinical anatomy treats that upper edge as a moving target. Medscape's clinical reference states plainly that the hairline is not a stable landmark, and that sex, age, family, culture, and fashion decide where it sits.

EVIDENCE

The field is still arguing about its own numbers

A 2018 paper in PLOS ONE argued that the high levels of agreement usually reported for facial judgements may be misleading, because the standard statistic inflates with sample size. The same authors found that judgements of trustworthiness and dominance carry significant private taste, meaning perceptions particular to the individual doing the looking.

OBSERVANCE

Institutions mark it, not just individuals

Turismo Central Luzon, a regional tourism office in the Philippines, posted for the day on 3 August 2025, writing that "a big forehead is a crown of confidence and character." The day is observed outside the United States as well as inside it.

AT A GLANCE

The forehead, anatomically

Share of the face
The upper third
Upper boundary
The hairline
Lower boundary
Glabella and frontonasal groove centrally, eyebrows laterally
Bone beneath
The frontal bone
Mean calvarial thickness
6.8 to 7.7 mm
Glabella, meaning
From a Latin root for hairless and smooth

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Big Forehead Day

The modern braincase is startlingly recent

Max Planck researchers reported that only fossils younger than 35,000 years show the same globular shape as present-day humans, suggesting modern brain organisation evolved some time between 100,000 and 35,000 years ago.

Brain size got there first, by a long way

The shape change evolved independently of brain size. The roughly 300,000-year-old Jebel Irhoud crania from Morocco already had endocranial volumes of around 1,400 millilitres, inside present-day variation.

Your skull rounds out after you are born

In present-day humans, the characteristic globular shape of the braincase develops within a few months around the time of birth.

Human faces have been shrinking for millennia

The University of York describes the flat modern forehead as a side effect of faces getting gradually smaller over the past 100,000 years, a process it calls particularly rapid in the last 20,000.

Phrenology's founder got real neuroanatomy right

The Science Museum Group credits Franz Joseph Gall as the first to identify the grey matter of the brain with active tissue and the white matter with conducting tissue.

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe National Big Forehead Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Read the 1598 act in the original spelling

The Oxford Text Archive hosts a full transcription of the Elizabethan statute, digitised from Early English Books Online. Find the clause on physiognomy and see whose company the law put face readers in, over at the Oxford Text Archive.

VISIT

Visit the portrait in Washington

Van der Weyden's Portrait of a Lady hangs in the West Building at the National Gallery of Art, Gallery M39. The museum's online record carries the same catalogue note if you cannot get to the room.

BROWSE

Browse a collection of phrenology casts

The Science Museum Group catalogues its phrenological plaster heads and masks as a single group object spanning 1820 to 1950. Working through the DeVille cast of Gall shows how long the trade ran.

READ

Read the study on judging faces

The PLOS ONE paper on inter-rater agreement is open access, so the whole argument is readable without a subscription. Its authors are careful about what their own numbers can and cannot show, which is the useful part.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Big Forehead Day?

1 / 8

Under the Elizabethan act of 1598, what happened to someone claiming knowledge of physiognomy?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing, so it is a normal working day. A search of congressional, Federal Register, and government publication records found no proclamation or resolution naming it.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

12sources
11primary records
8independently dated
Primary records
Oxford Text Archive, Bodleian Libraries1598
An acte for punishment of rogues, vagabonds and sturdie beggers
Full transcription of the Elizabethan vagrancy statute, digitised from Early English Books Online.
View source
Smithsonian Institution Human Origins Program
Homo sapiens
Species profile describing the modern skull, its vertical forehead, and average brain size.
View source
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft2018-01
Modern human brain organization emerged only recently
Endocast study dating the globular braincase to fossils younger than 35,000 years.
View source
University of York2018-04
Research to raise a few eyebrows: Why expressive brows might have mattered in human evolution
How researchers modelled away an archaic browridge and what they concluded, hedges included.
View source
National Gallery of Art
Portrait of a Lady, Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1460
Catalogue entry noting the sitter's plucked hairline as Burgundian court fashion.
View source
Wellcome Collection1789
Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 1789-1798
Catalogue record for the London edition of Lavater's illustrated physiognomy treatise.
View source
Science Museum Group
Franz Joseph Gall 1758 - 1828
Biography of phrenology's originator, including Austria's 1802 ban on his lectures.
View source
Science Museum Group1823
Phrenological head of Francis Gall
A plaster phrenological head made in London in 1823 by James DeVille.
View source
American Psychological Association1924
Validity of Character Judgments Based on External Criteria
Record for Cleeton and Knight's 1924 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
View source
PLOS ONE2018-08
Inter-rater agreement in trait judgements from faces
Argues the usual statistic for agreement about faces is inflated by sample size.
View source
Turismo Central Luzon2025-08-03
Big Forehead Day post, 3 August 2025
A Philippine regional tourism office marking the day on its official page.
View source
Additional coverage
Medscape
Forehead Anatomy
Clinical reference on the forehead's boundaries, the frontal bone, and hairline variability.
View source
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