SYNOPSISAtypical facial pain is a syndrome of chronic facial pain affecting mainly young women who are often emotionally disturbed. Current opinion favors a psychogenic cause for it, but no causal relationship has been established: not all those affected are emotionally disturbed and no single psychiatric disorder predominates among those who are. Early reports of the syndrome in fact described a migraine‐like disorder in which either episodic facial pain or episodic exacerbations of chronic pain were associated with arterial tenderness, a variety of autonomic symptoms and signs and sometimes a response to treatment with vasoconstrictors. Painful dilation of craniofacial arteries may cause atypical facial pain.