Melting Pot

I think it’s safe to say that everyone has experienced insecurity at some point in their life about their physical appearance. If not – go you! We could all use more self-confidence. That’s why I would love to see a web page created that is dedicated to celebrating our differences and visualizing the melting pot that the world has become.

My idea is a site that asks visitors to use their webcam to snap a picture of their face, which is then analyzed and catalogued according to various detailed facial features like skin color, nose shape, eye color, lip shape, etc. You can then hit a “Melt” button and the site will merge every face in the catalogue and produce a truly average face that is a blend of everyone who has uploaded their image. The more people who upload to the site, the more representative the generated face will be of the real population. Users could be able to filter by geographic region, sex, ethnicity, age, profession, and various other attributes voluntarily submitted with the uploaded photos. They should also be able to deconstruct the generated face to see which real individual faces composed it.

I think the result would be surprisingly eye-opening. We see so many “ideal” people in the entertainment industry, that it can sometimes skew our perspective of what is truly normal. We should instead celebrate our differences and realize that the real America is very different from on-screen America.