The one-letter difference
One of them has four legs. One of them buys the food. One of them is this website. Here is which is which, what the vote actually decides, and what we are and are not claiming when we say Face of the Breed.
Three words, one letter apart
A dog with a short muzzle and a flat face. Short for brachycephalic, from the Greek brachys, short, and kephale, head. Bulldogs, Frenchies, Pugs, Bostons, Boxers. Veterinarians have used the word for a century. We did not invent it and we are not redefining it.
“My brachy snores louder than I do.”
The person who lives with the brachy. Buys the food, books the vet, learns the breathing, knows the snore by ear. On this site they are the ones who vote, and the ones whose answers go on the breed page when their dog wins.
“Every crown here was cast by brachy parents.”
This place. The game, the vote, the archive, and the community under one name. It is never a dog and it is never a person. Brachys is where brachy parents decide which face represents the breed.
“She won Face of the Breed on Brachys.”
The mechanism
Three play-days in a week unlocks your vote. There is no buy button, no subscribe-to-vote, and no way to stack a bracket. A vote has to be earned by showing up.
Real dogs, posted by the people who live with them, seeded randomly so a newcomer always has a real shot. The bracket closes weekly. The count is published with the winner.
The winning photo leads the breed page for the week and stays in the history wall forever, with the week number and the vote count. Their parent answers three questions and those answers stay too.
So when somebody asks what a French Bulldog looks like, there are two honest answers. There is the written standard, and there is the dog that French Bulldog parents actually pointed at. This site is the second one, kept on the record.
Where we sit
We claim nothing official. What we have is the only picture of the breed chosen by the people who live with it.
Identity
The best faces come pre-smushed.
Settled weekly by the people who live with them.
One mark, used for one thing: a crown that has been won, or a crown that is still waiting. It never decorates. If you see it, something is either a champion or about to have one.
One is this week's best. The second sentence never gets to exist without the first.
Never somebody's dog. We will make fun of how hard it is to pick. We will not make fun of a face.
The frame is the joke and the joke is the point. We are the unofficial official Face of the Breed.
Not standard, not specimen, not official definition. Those words belong to kennel clubs. Ours is Face of the Breed.
A brachy is a dog with a short muzzle and a flat face. It is shorthand for brachycephalic, from the Greek brachys (short) and kephale (head). English Bulldogs, French Bulldogs, Pugs, Boston Terriers and Boxers are all brachy breeds.
The dog. The person is a brachy parent. Brachys with a capital B and an s is this website: the game, the vote and the archive.
BRACK-ee, rhyming with khaki. The plural brachys is BRACK-eez.
No, and deliberately not. A kennel club breed standard is a written document about conformation. Face of the Breed is a weekly community vote: no judges, no registry, no pedigree requirement, and nothing for sale. It records which dog the people who live with the breed chose.