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Front-facing
eyes level, looking straight into camera
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Even lighting
natural or soft frontal light, no strong shadows
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Face uncovered
no glasses, masks or hair across features
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Neutral expression
relaxed face, mouth closed
Physiognomics claimed to read character in the face.
This machine takes that claim at face value — and exposes its violence.
Your photo never leaves your browser and nothing is stored. To write the verdict, only anonymous measurements — ratios and angles — are sent to the AI.
⚠ Critical Note · Nota Critica
PRIMA IMPRESSIO is a work of critical media art. It performs physiognomic science — not to validate it, but to expose its internal mechanisms and the violence they produced.
Every measurement this system computes belongs to a tradition that was used to discriminate, exclude, sentence, and dehumanize. The nasal index sorted races. The Camper angle was reread as a ladder from ape to Greek statue. The Von Luschan scale appears in Nazi-era racial studies. Galton, who coined the word eugenics, searched for human "types" in composite photographs.
"Unconscious or dimly perceived finagling, doctoring, and massaging are rampant, endemic, and unavoidable." — Stephen Jay Gould on the craniometrists, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981.
A "shadow archive that encompasses an entire social terrain while positioning individuals within that terrain." — Allan Sekula, The Body and the Archive, October 39, 1986.
On method: the indices this engine computes — nasal index, Camper angle, Lombroso atavism, Ellis inversion, Nordic proximity and the rest — are critical reconstructions of the historical systems they name, derived from 2D facial landmarks. They are not the original craniometric measurements, and they are not valid as science — because the science they perform never was. The approximation is the argument: a pseudoscience faithfully re-enacted reveals itself as pseudoscience.
No facial feature reveals character, worth, intelligence, or destiny. Every verdict produced here is a historically faithful forgery — evidence of the system that produced it, not of the subject it examines.