Facemath

About

Facemath is a series of photographic charts based on mathematic equations that are meant to highlight facial resemblances among three celebrities.

Origin

The single topic Tumblr blog Facemath^[1] was launched on June 10th, 2010, with its first post featuring an equation combining actor Val Kilmer and the puppet ALF to become the Spanish soccer player Sergio Ramos.

Precursor

An earlier instance of formulaic celebrity look-alike images were the Celebrity Pokémon Evolution visual charts which began appearing on the social news site Reddit on August 9th, 2011. The series illustrated celebrities with common characteristics in parallel to the evolutionary lineage of characters from the Pokémon anime and video game franchise.

Spread

The blog remained fairly obscure until it was linked on the technology news aggregator website Hacker News^[8] and the technology news blog Nerdcore^[9] on July 7th, 2012. On July 9th, the Internet culture blog Laughing Squid^[4] published a post titled “Facemath, Blog Finds the Sum of Famous People’s Faces”, which included several notable examples from the Tumblr. On the following day, facemath compilations were posted on several Internet humor sites including UpRoxx^[3], BuzzFeed^[5], TheFW^[10] and Tosh.0.^[6] On July 11th, the Internet culture news blog The Daily Dot^[2] published an article titled “The Best Visual Equations By Facemath”, nothing that the series bears similarities to the Totally Looks Like photo meme. The same day, the blog was highlighted on the celebrity gossip site The Frisky.^[7]