Losing face

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Leo Kim on the uncanny distance between the faces we encounter digitally and our own reflections.

Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. Unable to tear himself from his own image, he wasted away. For the critics who anointed him the patron saint of the selfie generation, the takeaway here was always straightforward: our culture’s hyper-fixation on our own visages is a sign of misplaced priorities and moral ruin. But there’s a far subtler revelation hidden at the heart of this story—an overlooked lesson about the nature of images and how our bodies can be transformed by them. A strange thing happened to Narcissus’s face when it was reflected by the water; it became something else, estranged to its own bearer through no fault of his own, unrecognizable to even himself.

On platforms like TikTok, it’s not uncommon to see videos about the shock of encountering one’s own face. Recently, these involved the “Bold Glamour” beauty filter and the uncanny sensation of seeing yourself after removing it. “I don’t think my brain knows how to deal with looking like this one moment… and then this the next,” one user says in a viral video discussing the impact of the filter. Before that, it was people complaining that they couldn't recognize themselves in the images produced by Lensa AI—before that, a trend involving people’s horrified reactions to seeing their selfies inverted, and so on. Who among us hasn’t taken a picture and thought “I don’t really look like that, do I?”

As with Narcissus, we no longer seem to recognize our own faces in these reflections. This isn’t quite internet-induced bodily dysphoria, though it might be closely related (people’s reactions to the alienness of their faces are often neutral or positive, as with one trend involving a zoom effect that shows the face from a distance). Rather, it’s a sign that our relationship to the face has undergone a sort of transfiguration that has removed something essential in allowing us to identify ourselves.

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