Is it insulting to call a woman 'hatchet faced?"

Considering the film Cry-Baby has a character named Hatchet Face who is exceedingly ugly, yeah, I’d say it’s considered an insult. I’ve never heard it used to compliment anyone.

I never thought of it in purely physical terms, but also in attitude–she’s unforgiving and steely (there’s that literal-mindedness again), accepts no excuses, harsh.

But I may have been conflating hatchet-faced and battle-axe.

Just for future reference if you are referring to a porn star or other person/place/thing that may not be an appropriate thing to search for at work perhaps you could label it NSFW. That way my boss won’t think I am looking for porn stuff at work. :slight_smile:

I was thinking about her too. In Cry Baby the girl called Hatchet Face is apparently so named because it looks like she’s been hit in the face with a hatchet. Her face isn’t thin, it’s actually rather full and round, with unfortunately twisted/lopsided features. In the movie “Hatchet Face” pretty clearly meant not just ordinary ugly, but so ugly that one might think the woman had suffered a disfiguring accident.

Fresh faced?

If you wanted to convey the look without being insulting, and also describe the person as attractive, go with something like, “She has a pretty face with sharp features.”

I knew just by making that comment, people would come up with something. I’ve never heard of the latter, and I usually hear the former used a slight insult, implying on a male that he isn’t manly enough to grow a beard, and on a female, implying her face is still full of babyfat.

Both mean youthful-looking.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fresh-faced

Nice crowd you hang out with, where baby-faced is repurposed as an insult.

I’m not exactly sure why you felt the need to insult me and my friends because we use a word differently than you do.

And it’s not like it’s that strange: have you not seen the old Gillette commercial where a private is called baby-faced because he apparently doesn’t have to shave? Have you not seen the Star Trek TNG episode where Riker says he grew a beard because he was tired of being called Ensign Babyface?

As for the women, a lot of it has to do with the fact that we don’t find having a face that resembles a baby to be attractive. Maybe you do. Should I make fun of you?

In the song, “baby face” is certainly meant as a compliment.

To answer the OP: Yes, most definitely.

Hatchet faced to me means “face like an axe being thrown at you”. That is, very sharp, regal features. See how I did that? The second one sounds like a compliment.

Hatchet-faced is not a nice thing to say…

Regal, I like that.

I think the problem comes when you use sharp. Sharp can go either way. I mean, a sharp tone of voice, especially from a woman, often makes people think shrewish. But being a sharp dresser is good. And sharp features sound well defined.

“Baby face” is pretty much neutral and isn’t generally considered an insult by most people. It just means looking really youthful. Noah Wiley from the TV show ER was called “baby-faced” and “doe-eyed”, and “sexy”. True, some guys, like Commander Riker, don’t like being called baby-faced so much if it means having a hard time being taken seriously because they look too young to be authoritative. And yeah, beardless Riker was baby-faced: he had the big blue eyes and round cheeks.

A friend our ours is baby faced. She bears a striking resemblance to her five year old daughter.

I didn’t think of beardless Riker as baby-faced. I guess mostly just weird because when I saw my first season 1 ep of TNG I’d only seen him as bearded before. His face looked too thin without the beard to me. Like when you give your fluffy dog a bath and he looks all rat like. I googled for him beardless and he does look a bit babyfaced. In any event, the beard really suits him.

I wouldn’t like it, but why don’t you just axe her?

:wink: