Famous for Looking Like Someone More Famous
One of the more upsetting popular “challenges” on the short-form-video app TikTok goes like this: When the video starts, there’s no face visible, because the camera is pointed at the floor, or the back of a head, or a pair of hands with perfect square-tip acrylics, playing peekaboo. A clip from the 2008 Selena Gomez song “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know” plays in the background, starting at the pre-chorus, which goes “I hear it every day … I hear it all the time …” At this point, text pops up: “You look like Ariana Grande,” for example. Or, “OMG you look like Camila Cabello.” Then, just as the song’s chorus hits (“Tell me, tell me, tell me something I don’t know!”) the face is revealed.
And the face is just like Ariana Grande’s! Or if it’s a different face—just like Camila Cabello’s! The uncanny resemblance is often heightened with the use of an in-app special effect called “Face Tracking,” which finds a face as soon as it’s present in a video and zooms in on it aggressively.
These clips are, for me, a horrible surprise every single time. I’m on TikTok to laugh at teens or , not to stare into the literal eyes of the surreal. I don’t even have the option of waiting for the trend to pass, because this
