Mirror, Mirror, on the wall…

Early on in nearly every story, the writer comes across the necessity of doing a physical description of their characters, and their main viewpoint character in particular. There are two basic schools of thought on this. The first is to keep details to a bare minimum - maybe just hair and eye color - and let the reader fill in the rest of the picture for themselves; the second is to go for a more detailed and complete description.

Since the first way obviously doesn't take much doing, I'm...