About

Sloth-Facing is a photoshop meme in which the subject's eyes and eyebrows are horizontally aligned with the nose as to resemble the face of a sloth and the The Goonies character with the same name.

Origin

On May 30th, 2013, Redditor traverhass shared an Imgur album^[7] consisting of seven digitally manipulated screenshots from movies in which the actors' eyes and eyebrows have been vertically lowered to align with their noses. In the title of the post, he called the images “Sloth-Facing.” Within six days, the post gained more than 3,815 upvotes, 1,451 points overall and 143 comments.

Precursor: Tumblr Face Game

In 2011, a photoset collage of Hollywood actor Elijah Wood's facial features in close-up images (shown below, left) began circulating on Tumblr.^[2] On December 24th, 2011, Buzzfeed^[1] published a compilation of 26 similar collage-style photo sets depicting various celebrities with their facial features in disproportionate scale. The Elijah Wood photoset resurfaced on Reddit^[4] in April 2012, gaining 830 overall points, 10,960 upvotes and 410 comments in the WTF subreddit. On October 28th, 2012, the subreddit /r/Quasimoderp^[5] was launched. Two days later, the earliest known instance of such composite image without the white margins was submitted to the subreddit, featuring an image of actor Clint Eastwood^[6](shown below, right).

Spread

On May 30th, the sloth-faced images of celebrities and icons were compiled into a Tumblr photoset by Tastefully Offensive,^[8] where the post gained more than 10,400 notes within six days. Also on the 30th, the images were featured on Buzzfeed^[9], The FW{10] and Obvious Winner.^[11] In the following week, sloth-facing also appeared on Funny or Die^[12], Laughing Squid^[13], Blame It On The Voices^[14], Maxim^[15] and the Chive.^[16]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References