CIMG5097 Finished cast of my face

CIMG5097 Voila! This is the cast of my face. As one can see, my eyes are scrunched and I look like I’m about to vomit. This facial expression is due to the mouthpiece I was holding in my mouth for breathing. We concluded it was way too big. To preserve a natural shape of a person’s lips, a much, much smaller, discrete mouthpiece would be needed. The best thing, of course, would be to go without it and just breathe through the straws in the nose, which is what P and M did when they made casts of each other’s faces. I can’t breathe through my nose for long periods of time, so I needed this. It looks like I’m probably not a good candidate for a face-casting model.

The scrunching of the eyes is, of course, due to the fact that it’s really hard to keep a relaxed facial expression when thick goop is being poured on your eyes, nose and mouth — and gluing all facial orifices shut! The instinct that screams “I’m being buried alive!” in your head is pretty hard to shut up.

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