Chinese Face Reader Tells What’s Between the Lines

Though her craft is not well known and is sometimes pooh-poohed by skeptics, Lillian Lesefko nevertheless is making a good living as a Chinese face reader.

“Lawyers seem to be the most skeptical until I explain it and they end up using face reading to pick juries,” said the UCLA psychology graduate. “I think I’ve won them over.”

She said others have questioned her work, believing it is nothing more than fortune telling.

“I have disassociated myself from Chinese people who have taken face reading and turned it into a branch of fortune telling,” said Lesefko, who has written a book on Chinese face reading that will be published soon.

“I just need a title for it,” she said.

To help gain a full breadth of believability and no doubt to promote her visibility, Lesefko has been teaching Chinese face-reading classes and workshops to students, counselors, sales people, makeup artists, attorneys and image consultants throughout Orange County and elsewhere.

Her most recent “Introductory Chinese Face Reading” class was at Golden West College in Huntington Beach and others have been held at Fullerton and Cerritos colleges.

She said Chinese face reading is an ancient and honorable science that she learned as child from her Chinese mother and grandmother.

But the Eurasian woman, whose father was German, contends that she is the first to successfully market the face-reading skill. At one point, the mother of two children and wife of Steve Lesefko was a model for her grandmother’s sweater-making firm.

“Most Oriental people know about face reading, but not as a science,” she said. “I’ve been told it is similar to body language, which teaches people to read what is going on inside a person by the way they move parts of their body.”

In face reading, however, what is going on inside a person clearly can be seen from the lines on the face, said Lesefko, who says that he has already performed 200 personal consultations this year.

She charges $85 for a reading, which includes a 90-minute analysis of a person’s facial features and markings, resulting in a complete personality profile.

She also gives makeup lessons to women, which include methods to hide the lines she reads on faces.

“This is not fortune telling or anything else that some people might think are not legitimate,” she contends. “By reading a person’s face marking and the shape of their features, I’m able to get a personality profile.”

She said there are 150 markings on most faces, some of them formed both from the crises and happy times in their lives. And many of the markings even give a time frame.

“I have markings on my own face that tell the age I was married, my age when my father died and the age I had a child,” said the former Dana Point resident who now lives in Simi Valley.

The lines, she added, are contained in the ears, forehead, along the eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, chin and jaw.

“Although I’ve studied face reading and have read most of the books written about it, my mother (Lea Lowe) is still a better face reader than I am,” she said.

Her mother, however, disagrees. “She’s the best,” Lowe said.

Laguna Hills Leisure World resident Jeannette Kaufman, 75, went to Palm Springs to watch her granddaughter compete in a beauty contest, never realizing that she herself would end up winning a beauty title.

“I was petrified to get up there,” said Kaufman, who had never been in a beauty contest before. Sponsors of the American Dream Beauty Pageant that her granddaughter competed in promoted the contest for grandmothers. Kaufman was named “Prettiest Grandmother” in a contest judged by her granddaughter, Michelle Heard, 16, of Yucca Valley, and the other 20 young beauty contestants.

“I was the only one with white hair and that’s why I think I w on,” said Kaufman, who said she was nevertheless unhappy that her granddaughter didn’t win her contest.