Over the past 72 hours, you may have noticed your newsfeed filling with four-panel photos of your friends and celebrities looking just slightly off. Weirdly toothy grins. Gray hair and wrinkles. Male friends sporting faces full of makeup that look like they applied it with their non-dominant hands. These photos are the handiwork of a newly popularized app called, uninspiringly but accurately, FaceApp. While FaceApp — which creates “aged,” “smiling,” and “gender-swapped” faces from photos with surprising accuracy — itself has been around for months now, the app is having a moment right now.
The app is simple enough to use and lets you create either single morphed images — a picture of your selfie with an added smile or your long hair chopped off — or a collage with three different filters. Collages are, in this bloggers opinion, the way to go. The contrast is funny and the square shape is ripe for Instagramming.
To create your own, download FaceApp. (It’s now available for both iOS and Android phones.) Make sure to allow the app access to your camera roll. Then either take a selfie or select a picture from your phone. From there — be patient if “processing the photo” takes a little while — tap the “collage” icon and you’ll see the original image with three empty boxes containing plus signs. Tap each one to add a morphed photo — you’ll have eight options to choose from. Once you’re done, choose one of the social-media icons at the bottom of your screen to share directly from the app or tap the download arrow to save the photo to your phone.
