Let’s be trendy and mention one similarity between the late Dolly Parton and the late Tim Curry: both were famous for wearing wigs. And wigs can surprisingly affect facial recognition.
- Dolly’s love of huge wigs was only rivaled by Dolly’s huge…no I won’t go there.
- Tim was featured in a number of acting roles, but he famously wore a wig in his Rocky Horror stage and screen appearances.
Now in theory wigs shouldn’t affect facial recognition at all. Facial recognition prioritizes features that are less prone to change, such as the distance between the eyes. Even without using wigs, hair changes shape and color all the time.
But when Joseph Steinberg panicked after learning about Clearview AI, he offered tips about how to keep it and other facial recognition systems from identifying you. This is one of them:
“Style your hair and apply your makeup in ways that undermine the ability of facial recognition systems to analyze facial features.
“The first goal in this regard is to utilize hair or makeup in ways that substantially block portions of your face (especially your the eyes, nose, and forehead and the location where these features intersect), and that, thereby, cause facial recognition blocking in many systems and not realize that your face is a face—so they don’t even try to match and identify it.”
Anything that obscures these unchangeable features makes facial recognition systems less accurate.
Maybe Parton and Curry didn’t adopt a “hair over one eye” hairstyle…but some people have.

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