“[Jos’ Ortega y Gasset] labels one look ‘the most effective, the most suggestive, the most delicious and enchanting.’ He called it the most complicated because it is not only furtive, but it is also the very opposite of furtive, because it makes it obvious that it is looking. This is the look given with lidded eyes, the sleepy look or calculating look or appraising look, the look a painter gives his canvas as he steps back from it. . . .

Describing this look, Ortega said the lids are almost three-quarters closed and it appears to be hiding itself, but in fact the lids compress the look and ‘shoot it like an arrow.’

‘It is the look of eyes that are, as it were, asleep but which behind the cloud of sweet drowsiness are utterly awake. Anyone who has such a look possesses a treasure.’

Ortega said that Paris throws itself at the feet of anyone with this look. . . . Robert Mitchum certainly had it and it set him up for years as a masculine sex symbol. Mae West copied it and the French actress Simone Signoret has it. . . .”

—Julius Fast, Body Language, 1970.