to one's face

Idioms  

1. Openly, directly, as in I do not have the nerve to tell him to his face that he wasn't invited and shouldn't have come. This idiom alludes to a direct confrontation. [Mid-1500s]

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Example Sentences

“One cannot hold on to a Happening,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1962, “and one can only cherish it as one cherishes a firecracker going off dangerously close to one’s face.”

From New York Times

Not only are N95 masks hard to come by, but they need to be professionally fitted to one's face to ensure a tight seal.

From Salon

An interactive makeup museum, however, devoted to the idea of applying products to one’s face, seemed like another challenge to figure out altogether.

From New York Times

I mean this literally, as Collins explains that applying bacon to one’s face was said to prevent wrinkles.

From Washington Post

In his subsequent research, Caputo observed that the strange face phenomenon was not limited to one’s face reflected in the mirror, but it extended to other people’s faces, in situations where pairs of experimental participants gazed at each other for sustained periods of time in a dimly lit room.

From Scientific American