You may not make out with cousins, but if you’re often told you have a familiar look, you may have “cousin face.”
TikTok creator Evie Barenberg He explained the term after a mutual friend met him at a party.
After meeting the woman through a friend of a friend, Evie told her she looked familiar and quickly asked if they had met before.
They hadn’t, but the woman presented Evie with a term to describe what she had experienced.
“She’s like, ‘Oh, that’s just because I look like a cousin,'” Evie explained in her video.
TikTok creator Evie Barenberg (pictured) met a mutual friend at a party recently and thought she looked familiar, so she quickly asked if they had met before.
“I was like, ‘What the fuck is that cousin face?’ And she’s like, ‘Everyone’s always like, ‘You look like my cousin. You look like my cousin’s cousin.’ I look like everyone’s cousin,'” she shared.
Evie then noticed that they both looked “very similar,” meaning she might also have the same affliction.
“I look like a cousin,” the short video concluded.
Viewers were stunned by the term, although many agreed that Evie did indeed look like a cousin.
“I don’t even have a cousin and you look just like my cousin,” one person said.
“I have good news. When you have a cousin face in your 20s, it eventually turns into a ‘generic actress face’ around age 40. Random people stop me in stores to tell me I look like other actresses,” another added.
“Is this why people always tell me I look familiar?” another person questioned.
“Oh hi, it’s me, I have this face,” added a fourth. “‘You look familiar’ is a normal response to meeting me.”
A friend of a friend told her she had ‘cousin face,’ meaning she always looks like someone’s cousin.
Users were stunned by the term, although many agreed that Evie did indeed look like a cousin.
The topic was even discussed on The Kidd Kraddick Morning Show in Dallas, Texas, with host Ana Szabo.
Ana described the term to her listeners, saying it’s when someone seems vaguely familiar, but you can’t quite put your finger on why.
“It’s basically when you see someone and you think, ‘I think I know them from somewhere,'” he explained on the show.
Or something like, “Maybe he’s a friend of a friend or we’ve met before,” but you’re not entirely sure.
“Someone who seems… I don’t want to say bland, but like someone you’ve met before.”
Scientists have long investigated face familiarity, and Caltech biologists Le Chang and Doris Y. Tsao discovered that there is, in fact, a code for recognizing faces, and some are more recognizable than others.
In a 2017 article in CellThe Caltech team discovered that facial cells in the brain respond to the dimensions and features of a face, which could explain why certain people look instantly familiar to others.
The New York Times He said the fine-tuning of each cell in the face is a “combination of facial dimensions, a holistic system that explains why when someone shaves off his mustache, his friends may not notice for a while.”
The Caltech team went on to report that “about 50 such dimensions are required to identify a face.”
“These dimensions create a mental ‘face space’ in which an infinite number of faces can be recognized,” the paper reads. “There is probably an average face, or something like it, at the origin, and the brain measures the deviation from this baseline.”
In 2018, Isabelle Boutet, a psychology professor at the University of Ottawa, explained that as you get older, you are more likely to believe you recognize people.
“Older adults mistake strangers for familiar people because they have many faces stored in their memories,” he explained.
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