The kit breaks a full-face image up into component parts–hair, brows, eyes, nose, lips, chin-line with ears, and age lines, plus beard, hat, and glasses, if any.

It contains several dozen transparent slides picturing each of these components with
different types of contours, 500 slides in all

 with five notches on the side for different placements of each feature.

Each slide is coded with a letter for the facial component illustrated and a figure for the particular configuration.

One of the advantages of the kit is the ease with which its coding permits
a face to be recorded or transmitted to a distant location through
almost instantaneous assembly from another kit there.

A face is contained, for example, in the code message:

A17 N21X1 C30 E79 L16 D55 H92X4R SV40 SH20

Text from the Central Intelligence Agency, 2007