Face (professional wrestling)

In professional wrestling, a face (babyface) is a heroic or a "good guy" wrestler, booked (scripted) by the promotion with the aim of being cheered by fans. Faces, traditionally, wrestle within the rules and avoid cheating (in contrast to the heels who 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 blue-eyes in British wrestling, and técnicos in lucha libre. The face character is 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 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 emphasize brute strength and/or size while often having outfits akin to demons or other nasty characters.

Traditional faces are classic "good guy" characters who do not break the rules, follow instructions of those in authority such as the referee, are polite and well-mannered towards the fans, and often overcome the rule-breaking actions of their heel opponents to cleanly win matches. While many modern faces still fit this model, other versions of the face character are now also common. A good example would be Stone Cold Steve Austin who despite playing a heel early on in his career would start to be seen more of an anti-hero because of his popularity with the fans. While clearly not championing rule following, nor submission to authority, he was still regarded as the face in many of his duels such as his rivalry with World Wrestling Federation (WWF, later WWE) owner Mr. McMahon.

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