The human face plays a central role in most forms of natural human interaction so we may expect that computational methods for analysis of facial information and graphical and robotic methods for synthesis of faces and facial expressions will play a growing role in human-computer and human-robot interaction. However, certain areas of face-based HCI, such as facial expression recognition and robotic facial display have lagged others, such as eye-gaze tracking, facial recognition, and conversational characters. Our goal in this paper is to review the situation in HCI with regards to the human face, and to discuss strategies which could bring more slowly developing areas up to speed.