Face Rippers

Ever stick your face out of the window while someone else is driving?

If you’re going about 30 mph (about 50 km/h), you get this delightful sensation of vibrating lips and face-skin, right? I remember really enjoying this as a younger kid, at least when my parents would allow me to stick my head out of the window of a moving car.

Go a little faster, though, and the delight transforms into discomfort. Now your face is being pelted by tiny air molecules, and maybe even not-so-tiny dust particles. They kind of hurt, actually. Ouch. Slow down.

If you’ve ever done this at speeds above 60 mph (100 km/h), you probably stopped almost immediately. The skin from your face feels almost like it’s starting to be ripped off of your underlying facial musculature.

Face-ripper is now a term of art in stock market trading. This is when there’s a rally in a stock that pretty much nobody saw coming, and it’s like vertical for a while. You might hear a trader saying they just got their face ripped off by a trade, or maybe the whole market just had a rip-your-face-off rally.

There’s also the metal/punk meaning, where music is so intense it just rips your face right off. A face ripper in music is a track or record that completely shreds.

It’s an incredible phrase, but I can’t help but articulate the question that’s being implied here: would your face really be ripped off if you went fast enough?

The good news is that if you’re curious about something, you can probably find out all about it these days. The bad news is that there’s some math involved, and also that your face really will get ripped off if you go fast enough.

That feeling of pleasant and steady wind pressure at 30 mph doesn’t double when you increase your speed to 60—it quadruples, since wind pressure rises with the square of the speed. Go a little faster, feel a lot more pressure.

You’re thinking: sure, but rip your face right off? What kind of pressure are we talking about here?

If you get up to 200 mph, you’re entering the territory of fighter pilots who have ejected mid-flight. At these speeds, the pressure is eleven times higher than what you felt when you were going 60 mph for that uncomfortable few seconds. Pilots can suffer injuries like eye hemorrhages, severe neck strain, and even fractured bones.

The faster you go, the more air becomes like a wall and less like a river.

The dumb math suggests that shearing of the skin away from the underlying muscle would truly begin around 900 mph (1450 km/h), where aerodynamic drag finally exceeds the tensile strength of human skin. This is where the flapping and tearing would start in earnest, although biology matters more than math here: you’d almost certainly already be dead from other things first.