Do white box methods for feature extraction exist for facial recognition?
For every feature $F$ you want to extract you need an algorithm extracts $F$.

the color histogram is good for color. For example if you need to extract eye color you need find eye in face (you can use open cv and see documentation) that is a 3 2D-matrixes for pixels(Red and Green and Blue filters) and if you find the histogram of these 3 matrixes you can use this histogram as eye color feature.

If you find face (with open cv) and extract the histogram, this feature isn't bad for skin color.

I think the heights and distances are not good features.

For finding face's shape HOG feature is good and also HOGColor