In professional wrestling, a face (babyface) is a heroic, "good guy" or "fan favorite" wrestler, booked (scripted) by the promotion with the aim of being cheered by fans. They are portrayed as heroes relative to the heel wrestlers, who are analogous to villains. Traditionally, face characters wrestle within the rules and avoid cheating while behaving positively towards the referee and the audience. Such characters are also referred to as blue-eyes in British wrestling and técnicos in lucha libre. Not everything a face wrestler does must be heroic: faces need only to be clapped or cheered by the audience to be effective characters. When the magazine Pro Wrestling Illustrated went into circulation in the late 1970s, the magazine referred to face wrestlers as "fan favorites" or "scientific wrestlers", while heels were referred to as simply "rulebreakers".

Professional wrestling is a form of athletic theater that combines mock combat with drama, under the premise that the performers are competitive wrestlers. Although it entails elements of sports wrestling and martial arts, including genuine displays of athleticism and physicality before a live audience, professional wrestling is distinguished by its scripted outcomes and emphasis on entertainment and showmanship. The staged nature of matches is an open secret, with both wrestlers and spectators nonetheless maintaining the pretense that performances are bona fide competitions; this is likened to the suspension of disbelief employed when engaging with fiction.