Physique Metaphors, Analogies and Similes
His skull is only to be found in anthropology textbooks; he's skipped several stages of evolution.
My heart-rate wouldn't slow; it pounded like a heavy pair of boxing gloves.
Fingernails too long for the Bride of Dracula.
Imagine a huge cactus in Arizona desert: that's the shape of Caleb fingers.
The back of his hand was inscribed with a calligraphy of blue veins.
Tracey's hips filled her jeans like two generous scoops of chocolate ice cream.
A dress so tight on the hips she had the shape of a dustpan.
He had a chip on each shoulder, like epaulettes.
Women should nip in at the equator.
The old man pointed the way with an ET-like finger.
His prominent Adam's apple bobbed up and down like a fleshy elevator.
His heart throbbed like an animal about to hatch.
As grubby as a gravedigger's fingernails.
The load of Syed's waist-line forced his short legs apart either side of the chair, like the splayed legs of a frog.
After eating Raj's home-made authentic curry, my colon worked like the log flume at Alton Towers.
The definition of his forearms looked like the Mississippi river system.
The old lady's fingers were the roots of a mangrove tree at low tide.
Our Italian colleague couldn't stop waving his hands about like war-planes in mid-dogfight.
Legs set like the jointed front strut of a moon vehicle.
Success can weaken anyone if it goes on too long uninterrupted; the muscles go weak like an astronaut's in space.
So full of surgery collagen she looked like an orang-utan.
Their arms pumping like pistons.
On his arrival Julia felt the soft hooves of her own heartbeat.
As naked as the tails of rats.
When Veronica doesn't wear a bra it is like two bulldogs fighting in a sack.
His biceps were pumped to the same pressure as the tyres of a ten-ton truck.
Her swollen ankles and thin thighs gave the impression her legs were on upside down.
Sunburned, my shoulders feel as though they have been scourged with whips dipped in vinegar.
Eyes
The bags under Clement's eyes exceeded any aeroplane allowance.
Eye make-up like a badger.
Bags under the eyes have acquired their own bags.
Eyes that were liquid brown like a couple of beetles in two saucers of boiling soup, swimming as fast as Ian Thorpe and Pieter van den Hoogenband.
Eyes perched on a pair of blood-rimmed beer guts.
Her blue eyes lit up like a blowtorch.
Eyes like burnt holes in a blanket.
His eyes took on a look of cautious reserve which you see in parrots when offered half a banana by a stranger of whose bona fides they are not convinced.
He was so shocked that his eyeballs were on the end of knitting needles.
Huge dark eyes like hyperthyroidic marbles.
To say Renata's eyes are green isn't right; it's better to say that someone blasted a billion-watt searchlight behind a majestic stained-glass window.
Restless eyes that read you like a newsreader's autocue.
I've seen nicer eyes on a potato.
Cavernous eyes like two vast, overworked quarries in the facial landscape.
She stared with the burning eyes of a royal cobra.
In the morning, Brendan's eyes were like two rifle targets after raw army recruits have finished their first target practice session.
Twinkling eyes like sequins sewn on a shroud.
The detective's eyes were as hard as splintered concrete struck with a pickaxe.
Eyes like narrow stab wounds loaded with blood.
Eyes as uncoordinated as a toddler on E numbers.
Eyes fierier than any Tabasco.
Eyes the colour of the sea on a postcard from Tahiti.
The young girl's eyes were silent tongues of love.
Mouth & Smile
The guy's long teeth stuck out like bayonets in an ambush.
The tramp's teeth leaned this way and that like terrace houses that prop each other up after a bomb explosion.
There's daggers in men's smiles.
A nervously forced smile, like a cancer patient to a doctor's joke.
His mouth had the coldly forbidding look of a closed door of a subway express when you have just missed the train.
Angelina Jolie's lips are so big she could whisper in her own ear.
Lips like a close pair of fat slugs.
Her smile was as faint as a fat lady at a fireman's ball.
His rictus smile was as stiff as frozen fish.
Julia's smile is so wide it's like a Yamaha keyboard.
She had a single indented tooth like a sticking piano key.
The salesman's mouth was as wide and tenacious as a pit bull terrier.
A smile that revealed too much pink wildness.
A subtle smirk measured with Planck's constant.
The plastic smile people wear when suppressing a scream.
He frowns with exaggeration while his eyebrows do synchronized press-ups.
His mouth was used as a latrine by a small creature of the night, and finally as its mausoleum.
She's a stick with a gob like a mean letterbox.
Net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping.
A mouth drawn in like a miser's purse
As nauseating as watching someone eat with an open mouth.
I stare at the camera's pulsating red self-timer light, and feel my smile fading like a newsreader being counted in.
Your smile makes you look like you're recovering from a stroke.
The begrudging smiles that Roman gladiators gave the Emperor before starting the fight to the death.
His smile was all wrong, like seeing pieces of your safari guide's clothes wedged into a lion's teeth.
The right honourable gentleman's smile is like the silver fittings on a coffin.
His smile was more of a grimace that a toad makes when trying to shallow too big an insect.
A smile so faint it could be one of the three versions of the Mona Lisa are underneath the visible one.
A flickering smile like a torch with a failing battery.
His mouth steamed out heat like the very vent of Hell.
Smiling benignly like a vicar at a prize-giving ceremony.
The VAT tax inspector smiled like a child who knows precisely where in the flower bed he has buried his father's wallet.
She's a waxwork with two settings: the frozen stare and the fixed smile.
His mouth was annoyingly open, as though a zoo animal inviting buns, especially when any young ladies where present.
Teeth
His multi-hued teeth shone wetly like abandoned tombstones, and his tongue darted in and out of them like a scaly ferret.
After leaving the dentist, my tongue felt like somebody coming home to find his furniture gone.
She has more teeth than a Ferrari gearbox.
When he eats, he looks like a pensioner struggling with a set of ill-fitting dentures.
You have more nerve than an infected tooth.
When Gerald speaks, his teeth whistle like a kettle and he has the neck-twitch of a Spanish gecko swallowing mouthfuls of dry ants.
That chap has the teeth of an old laughing racehorse.
His teeth were broken pottery fixed with pre-war aircraft-glue.
She's got teeth belonging to a rat who's spent a lifetime smoking tar.
His teeth are irregularly shaped like shattered pieces of a Roman mosaic.
Gerald's teeth are so gritted you could use them on a snow-covered motorway.
Your teeth are like stars — they come out at night.
Slabs of teeth like Stonehenge after a direct meteorite impact.
Jeanine talks so much it's amazing her teeth stay in.
As sadly quiet as the clash of toothless gums.
Claude smiled showing teeth like an unreliable dog.
Face
When Gilbert is cross, his face swells up and turns purple like the rear end of an amorous baboon.
His face, with the long proboscis and protruding teeth of an Apocalyptic horse, betrayed animality.
Steve has the contorted face of a bank robber without the aid of a nylon stocking mask on his head.
A brass-faced beautician self-advertising spray-tan.
When the Americans first saw Camilla they thought the bulldog clip that keeps Joan River's face in place had slipped off.
A face like the north-end of a south-bound bus. My brains are hanging out like the intestines of a rabbit. My tongue is as hot as a camel-saddle mounted by baked Bedouins. My eyes like over-ripe tomatoes strain at the sweating glass of a Saharan hothouse.
A shrivelled face like a collapsed lung.
A factory-worker face that looked like street cobbles worn by too many centuries.
A pink face with red highlights like a Degas peach.
His frozen face was as impassive as an effigy in a cold church.
Reg's blanched, lipless face swivelled around, like something from the Exorcist, as he looked for someone to blame.
Intellectual blemishes, like facial ones, grow more prominent with age.
The face was pock-marked, like a wall that's been well abused by firing-squad bullets.
The air against his face had the warm kiss of fever.
He looked like Frank Sidebottom without wearing a papier mâché head.
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face, her work of fiction.
Jon sports a face only a fist could love.
The type of face that looks more at home peering over a five-barred gate.
The villain's face was textured like a gnarled bone.
Her face was fresh in colour, like the light reflected from a heap of rose-petals.
( Speaking of Ralph Richardson ) I don't know his name but he's got a face like half a teapot.
Lance chopped the air with his hatchet face.
No one is saying X shouldn’t be allowed to marry a woman who has a face like Iggy Pop’s armpits.
The event security was tighter than Joan River's face.
Over the front of his head a fascinating array of faces streamed continuously, like Jim Carrey showing off in a wind tunnel.
He pulled a face like a man caught by the neck in lift doors.
The shop assistant's face was as expressive as a lump of sugar.
He has a face like a meat pie without the crust.
His face bore the marks of ancient battles like meteor impacts from millions of years ago on the surface of the moon.
A face like a milkman's round — long and dreary.
A nutcracker of a face: the chin and nose attempting to join over a sunken mouth.
A haggard face like an old priest who's worn out from too many years of hearing the same sins men commit.
A toby jug face the colour of parma ham.
His facial expression was of someone being threatened by a pterodactyl.
A face like a pitted moonscape.
The novelty hall mirror was convex, and made me look like a pygmy with water-on-the-brain.
Considering Prescott's face, you'd think his main hobby had been stepping on rakes.
If a good face is a letter of recommendation, a good heart, a letter of credit.
Sylvia opened the front door, and it was only the postman. But her expression was as though seeing a notorious school bully in middle age.
The serial number of the human specimen is the face. It reflects neither character, nor soul, nor what we call the self.
The boy's little hands explored the texture of his grandad's face — and it felt like Stonehenge.
After missing a short putt, Colin Montgomerie had a face like a warthog that has been stung by a bee.
My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.
Jagger has a face like a wet flannel hanging off a doorknob.
Chin & Neck
Tracey has so many double chins that she needs a bookmark to find her mouth.
A hard man with a neck the size of a bus.
His jaw stuck out like the tray of an open cash register.
Her neck would normally only be seen on a carving dish at Christmas.
His rock-like chin could dangle from a cave ceiling, spot-lit, in a gorge.
His neck is so wrinkled you could use it as a cheese grater.
More chins than a Chinese phone book.
A neck pleated like a clown’s oversized trousers.
She had several chins. The smallest chin shook like a cup in its saucer.
Her neck was similar to drought-resistant cattle in India.
Lionel has a chin like one end of an ironing board.
He has so many double chins he looks like he's peering over a pile of pancakes.
A stiff long neck like a Prussian corporal in a cartoon.
So many chins she looks like she’s staring over a sliced loaf.
His chin was deeply cleft and savagely shaved, like a petite pair of smarting buttocks.
A neck as wrinkled as a road-map.
Skin
His cheeks were like an ancient statue corroded by tears.
His skin looked like a child's sandpit after heavy rain.
A Costa-del-Crime villain with the complexion of crushed tenners.
The lines on the teacher's face reminded the boy of a marionette.
Her make-up routine resembles icing a mouldy cake.
Skin as grimly lined as a blighted northern terrace town.
She was smeared in an omelette of make-up.
Parchment-like skin denied sunlight for thirty years.
Deep parenthesis round the mouth made him look his fifty years.
Vivienne has a pair of quotation marks wrinkled around her eyes.
A brown sugar spillage of freckles.
His skin was like a street before they lay the pavement.
Skin as mottled as a tablecloth in a cheap cafeteria.
His facial skin was like a window cleaner's sponge.
Her cheeks are smooth, like expensive writing paper.
Ears & Nose
Sue was a fire-breathing chimera with an ancient coin profile.
My maths teacher had a nose longer than an anteater.
Ronnie has so many hooks in his nose that he looks like a piece of bait.
A profile to carve a joint.
The nostrils were set in a fixed flare, like a sensitive woman re-entering a room and noticing a smell that wasn't there before.
A nose like a sharp autumn evening, inclined to be frosty toward the end.
Prince Charles's ears are so big he could hand-glide over the Falklands.
He looked down his nose at my entry form like the Head Waiter at the Savoy finding a fly in the soup.
When laying down, his nose was the profile of the Matterhorn. Dali could have easily trompe l'oeiled him into a landscape.
I couldn't pay attention to what the lecturer said due to his prominent Mr. Spock ears.
Poor old Walter had a nose like a distorted organic vegetable.
His nose is so long it makes Pinocchio's look like a cat.
Her nose had enough of an upturn for a ski jumper to take-off.
His ears make him look like a taxicab with both doors open.
Hair
This fellow seems to attract bad luck like bald men attract comb-overs.
Bald as a billiard ball.
Eyebrows were unpleasantly bushy and joined up like Noel Gallagher morphing into Brezhnev.
As Rufus spoke his woolly caterpillar eyebrows wriggled to a random beat.
I have to tell you that Barry's new coal-black toupée fits his head like a sock drying on a mailbox.
Her hair was as painfully red as chilli powder rubbed into a blister with blood in it.
As welcome as the clumps of hair that collect in the bath plughole.
Old Zandra dyes her hair so often that her passport photo has a colour-wheel.
Her hair was so tightly pulled back that she looked like a cod.
Hair like a brittle crow's nest.
On the roof the builders had added scaffolding more rigid than Donald Trump's hairpiece.
Joan Collins looks like she combs her hair with an egg beater.
Linda's dreadlocks looked like fag ash.
The Falklands War boiled down to two bald men fighting over a comb.
Old women with hair like feather dusters.
A few hairs spread carefully over his head like fiddle strings.
At the electrical retailers, the spotty salesman had enough 'product' in his hair to fry a fish.
A ferret twitched on Roland's top lip.
Joan's capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.
His bald dome shone brightly — as though a snail had covered every inch in a trail of grease.
The eyebrows were curls of unlit gunpowder.
Her vivid hair was a sun-bleached, haystack delirium on a van Gogh postcard.
His bushy beard made him look like he was peering over a hedge.
Dennis Rodman's latest hairstyle looks like the inkblot test I get at my psychiatrist.
A failed beard that suggested a young child with jam on his chin.
Tonight, I feel like the last hair on a head going bald.
His eyebrows were raised higher than a drag queen in a planetarium.
Dexter was menacingly blond: more blond than platinum, more like plutonium, his hair colour-coordinated with his teeth.
Her hair was provocatively curled in bouncing question marks. A few locks of white hair clung to Barry's scalp like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock during a storm.
His hair was implausibly gelled like a photograph of a rainforest the instant after a bomb explosion.
A ram's horn moustache.
Lance's hair looked as though it could scour pans.
Fragile hair like spun sugar and candyfloss.
Since our last meeting, Claude's hair had turned from taiga to tundra.
His hair-do makes him look like a newly-thatched cottage.
Barry is so thin and bald that when his head catches the sun he looks like an unused match.
A beautiful waterfall of hair.
Pam's Eighties vintage hair was styled with a Van Der Graaf generator.
Size
The last time I saw legs like that they supported a table on the Antiques Roadshow.
That's like a barber's chair that fits all buttocks.
Kerry's figure is not so much an hourglass as a brandy glass.
She belched like a bricklayer with a bum to match.
The corpulent poor waddle in shopping malls as brontosauran families.
At the beach she was the only one getting a tan; the only exercise she gets is jumping to conclusions.
You can get an idea of Tracey's silhouette by imagining a drawing made in a life-class by a beginner student who was blindfolded.
He’s lost six pounds. Mind you, that is like throwing a deck chair off the Queen Mary.
Thighs bulged out of the shorts like cream from an éclair.
Gerald has the ability to walk under a bed without banging his head.
Maxwell was like the Great Wall of China: you could see him from space.
When he floats in the pool, he's a reverse iceberg — 90 per cent of him is visible.
With these inflatable rings for tummies, can you see us bend over backwards in the battle of the bulge?
I had no intention of giving her my vital statistics. “Let me put it this way,” I said. “According to my girth, I should be a ninety-foot redwood.”
I called him from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest.
Lori looked as if she'd been poured into her tracksuit of fat and had forgotten to say, “When!”
Her full face was a Pre-Raphaelite muse addicted to cider and chips.
He was built on a grand scale, like a Russian war memorial.
Astronomers could classify Bruno's body as a planet like Saturn but with larger rings of fat.
Gerald is so thin that it's brutally clear his neck supports more of a skull than a head.
She resembled a giant economy-sized tube of toothpaste: squeezed at all points, her shape defied definition by the most resourceful geometrician.
Old Brian's knobbly knees hummed like tuning forks.
Thinner than a brace of Versace models in a trouser press.
Bruno had a daily appetite that consumed the equivalent of his body mass, like a worm or small rodent.
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