Face It-- I'm Hot

This "Star Face" Analogia comparison software meme that's going around the internet is quite interesting. You load a photo of yourself, and click on the eyes, and the software analyzes your face and tells you what celebrities you look like. It's supposed to work best when the face is straight ahead. In trying to do this for myself, I realized a couple of things.

The first is that I rarely take pictures with my face straight ahead. Most of the time, I'm sideways. I quirk my head a bit to the left almost every time. I did not realize I do this. I don't actually know why-- it's not a conscious attempt to, say, get my good side (I don't think I have a good or bad side). So it was really hard to find a good photo to use for this project. The one I did use, there on the far left of my screen, is a rather old but cute photo. I like my hair like that.

The second thing I realized is the sinister part. If you go to the main page and not the celebrity face page, you find that this software is being developed as part of "person identification in criminal investigations performing the recognition of the unknown human portrait in large database" (to quote the website, which has slightly off English grammar, so I suspect is being developed in another country). So what I think is that all the people submitting their photos and laughing over who they look like are actually helping them test the software. How else could they get millions of totally random people to post their photos to their database? It's clear that they have lots of celebrity photos, gotten off of the internet. So my sinister suspicious Scully self said "this is really funny. Now my photo is in their database. I'd better not commit any crimes."

But I'm not too worried, because, based on my little experiments, the software still has a long way to go. The first photo got me matched up with the following fun results:

Another photo got these:

So clearly, hairstyle, lipstick/smile, and other effects do change the results slightly. My vanity wants to believe I somehow resemble Audrey Hepburn, but I know I do not. Most of my life, if I get a "hey, you look like" it's been: Molly Ringwald (cause of my hair) Ally Sheedy (which I think is much closer) Frances McDormand (you know, the chick from Fargo). My sister used to get Jamie Lee Curtis all the time, so that one is a maybe. It seems the software goes on eye distance, and maybe chin shape.

If I post the first picture and say I'm a male, I get the following:


I even saw an example someone else put up where they posted their cat's photo, so I tried this myself. Tituba, of course, is psyched that she looks like Nikki Taylor and Giselle. She is a little bummed about the Mariah Carey thing though. She watched Glitter one night when she couldn't sleep and has never been able to listen to Mariah since. I think I got Giselle on one of the attempts to get a good results list, so maybe it's true that you start to resemble your pets over time. How the heck do they analyze cat face and get these results?


via Feministe