faces

In professional wrestling, a face, babyface or baby is a heroic or a “good guy” wrestler, booked (scripted) by the promotion with the aim of being cheered by fans. Faces, traditionally, will wrestle within the rules and avoid cheating (in contrast to the heels that use illegal moves and call in additional wrestlers to do their work for them) while behaving positively towards the referee and the audience. Such characters are also referred to as a blue-eye in British wrestling, and faceo or técnico in lucha libre. The face character will be portrayed as a hero relative to the heel wrestlers, who are analogous to villains. Not everything a face wrestler does must be heroic: faces need only to be cheered by the audience to be effective characters. The vast majority of wrestling storylines involving faces will place a face against a heel, although more elaborate set-ups (such as two faces being manipulated by a nefarious outside party into fighting) often happen as well. In the world of lucha libre wrestling, they’re generally known for using moves requiring technical skill, particularly aerial maneuvers, and wearing outfits using bright colors with positive associations (such as solid white). This is contrasted with the villainous ‘rudos’ that are generally known for being brawlers, using physical moves that empathize brute strength and/or size while often having outfits akin to demons or other nasty characters.