CIMG5085 Facecasting: the finished mold in profile

CIMG5081 This is the finished mold of my face after I peeled it off of me, in profile. The funny thing is, you are looking at the concave side of the mold, even though it appears convex to you. The blue stuff is alginate, which is the inner layer of the mold, but it looks as if it’s on the outside. It’s an optical illusion. Another example of it can be seen in the picture of my friend P holding a mask.

It’s odd that my eyes look open in this mold, though I kept them closed the whole time — you definitely don’t want alginate getting in your eyes.

The end goal of this process was to make a plaster mask of my face, as documented in this blog post. This was done by my friends M and P. They used to make plaster masks based on real human faces. They would first make a cast of a person’s face from alginate, a gooey material that captures the shape of your facial features to a tiniest detail. On its basis they would make an actual mask out of plaster.

February 2007, Austin, Texas