It Kind of Looks Like a Face

"Look! Those are his eyes, he's happy to see you!"

Stan: And here we have Rock-That-Looks-Like-A-Face Rock. The rock that looks like a face.
Tourist 1: Does it look like a rock?
Stan: No, it looks like a face.
Tourist 2: Is it a face?
Stan: No, it's a rock that looks like a face!

— Gravity Falls, "Tourist Trapped"

A typically faceless object is found that inexplicably resembles the face of another person, usually a historical figure. Sometimes the one possessing the object may believe for a moment that the historical figure that the item represents is talking to them. The visage may also represent a religious figure, such as Jesus, and will be believed to be a holy sign from above.

There is a grain of Truth in Television to this trope: Psychologists are certain that the human brain is hard-wired to recognize faces. This condition is called pareidolia. This tendency is so strong, it leads people to perceive "faces" in totally random things such as the pattern of browning on a piece of toast or the weathering of a rock, or strange shapes in the clouds, even though they're nothing more than optical illusions.

This trope is in effect only when the object doesn't intentionally look like a face (or is, but isn't supposed to be recognized as such), but people swear it does. Weathering on a rock counts, but not a statue, a carved coin, or Rushmore Refacement. Seeing a face in a potato, burnt toast, or corn chip counts, but not a miniature gummi of the Venus de Milo.

Compare the Inkblot Test, where a patient is judged by what they may see in incoherent stains. Contrast The Blank, when someone who should have a face doesn't have one, and Rushmore Refacement, where someone commits an act of graffiti by carving their own face in the side of a mountain. See also Beast with a Human Face. This trope is often a source of Poorly Lit Pareidolia.

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Examples:

Arts

• There are plenty of optical illusions that take advantage of this.
  • One can show either an old woman or a young one depending on how interprets the features, or what direction one holds the picture.
  • The Rubin Vase, which depending on how one looks at it can either show a single vase or two faces.
• The paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo show portraits of people made entirely out of fruits and vegetables.
• Movie poster art, particularly for horror films, can take advantage of this for creepy effect. As one example, consider the poster for It Lives by Night featuring a screaming "face" in the river.

Comic Books

• In Creature Tech, the local tourist trap owner claims to have a cinnamon roll bearing the image of Jesus. Dr. Ong thinks it looks more like John Lennon.

Comic Strips

• Dilbert:
  • One story arc featured the cynical Wally deliberately creating — and nurturing — a coffee stain in the cafeteria that looks like the face of Jesus to exploit the credulous. He is seen adding to it with judicious drips and drizzles...
  • In a similar arc, Dogbert drew a smiley face in a jar of peanut butter and claimed it was a miraculous image of "Saint Ted".
• In one For Better or for Worse comic, Elizabeth and April notice all kinds of things in the house look like they have faces. April freaks out saying the house is watching her.
• This Heart of the City starts with Heart seeing Kristin Chenoweth in a slice of toast.

Films — Animation

• In the Cars films, the landscapes have car-shaped formations in keeping with this trope as applied to a world populated by sentient cars. The same concept applies in Planes, but with airplanes instead.

Films — Live-Action

• Exploited in Chronicle, where Andrew uses his telekinesis to create a visage of the Virgin Mary in his pancake syrup to freak out a passing waitress.
• The doctor in Return to Oz tries to convince Dorothy of this trope applying to a symmetrically wired electroshock machine.
• Many objects in The Shining's Overlook Hotel suspiciously resemble human faces, most notable and obvious being the"river of blood" scene (warning: nightmare fuel). Many people say it is a manifestation of the Overlook Hotel itself looking down on the characters, others say that it represents the screaming in agony faces of the victims of history. Either way, it's definitely creepy.
• In both The Car and The Car: Road to Revenge, the design of the eponymous vehicles make the headlights look like eyes and the grille like a grinning mouth.
• In Killdozer!, the twin headlights and grille of the possessed bulldozer look like a malevolent face.
• Herbie The Love Bug and Christine also have rather obvious faces in their front ends if one looks close enough.

Literature

• A Running Gag in The Truth involves a man who keeps bringing vegetables from his garden that resemble human faces (and sometimes other body parts) in to the newspaper in the hope that they will find it newsworthy and perhaps print a picture.
• Good Omens features a gag about a tabloid magazine that reports things like people seeing the face of Jesus in various places.
• Brother Eagle, Sister Sky: The artwork is crafted so that faces can be seen in the branches of trees, groupings of stones and ripples in the water mirroring the speech's discussion of seeing reflections of ancestors in the nature they once interacted with.
• Exploited for the cover of the book version of Alice Isn't Dead (as seen on that page). What you see is a truck and its exact reflection, maybe on a wet road. Try to not see a skull.
• In Jean Stafford short story "The Children's Game", Abby is not impressed with the architecture in the Belgian resort of Knokke-Heist, noting that many of the houses look like "faces with bulbous noses and brutish eyes."

Live-Action TV

• A guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was a woman who worked at a potato chip factory. She collected potato chips which looked like famous people. At one point while showing her collection, she turned away from Johnny and he took a big crunch; but it was from a bowl of chips he had stashed behind his desk.
• Bones: A Victim of the Week is found in a bale of recycled cardboard. The staining of her blood makes some of the workers who find the bale think it's a vision of the Virgin Mary.
• Johnny Bago: Johnny's RV is taken for a religious shrine because a dirt mark on the front looks like Jesus.
• This was a Running Gag with resident weirdo Cliff on Cheers for a while. He grows a potato that he thinks looks just like Richard Nixon ("The Groom Wore Clearasil"), a turnip that looks like June Lockhart and a squash that looks like the Hawaiian Islands ("Don Juan Is Hell"), another June Lockhart turnip and a Meryl Streep ear of corn ("Dark Imaginings"), and another squash that looks like George Shultz ("Cheers: The Motion Picture").
  Cliff: Hey, I got a potato here that looks just like Richard Nixon.
  Carla: Try finding one that doesn't.
• Glee: Finn's subplot in the aptly-named episode "Grilled Cheesus" is kickstarted when he thinks he sees Jesus on his grilled cheese sandwich◊.
• An episode of Full House involves a partially peeled potato that looks like Joe Pesci.
• Saving Grace has a couple of episodes featuring "Holy Cow": A bovine with mottles that many characters swear look like the face of Christ.
• An episode of Designing Women revolves around a shovel with discoloration that looks like Elvis.
• Conversed in the Supernatural episode "Good God, Y'All!" when Dean disparages Castiel's search for God by sarcastically suggesting that God might be on a tortilla in New Mexico.
• In Chockablock, a British children's series from the 1980s, the titular computer's tapedrive was deliberately designed to resemble a face, with the spools as the "eyes" and the lights below as a "mouth" and "nose".

Music

• The Swirling Eddies reference it in "Urban Legends": "The face of Saint Paul in this butt roast / assures me that I'm going up to Heaven".

Theatre

• In the Sister Act musical, Sister Mary Robert sings that she became a nun after seeing Jesus, Mary and various saints' faces in food.

Toys

• BIONICLE: The island of Mata Nui loosely resembles a face with Naho Bay as an eye, Mt. Ihu as the nose, and Mangai Volcano as the mouth. This subtly foreshadows The Reveal that the slumbering Great Spirit that is the island's namesake is a continent-sized Humongous Mecha lying on the ocean floor, and the island conceals it's otherwise exposed face. ^note The name "Mata Nui" actually comes from the Maori words for "big face".

Video Games

• Sam & Max Hit the Road:
  • One of the attractions you can visit is the Celebrity Vegetable Museum, which features assorted fruits and veggies that resemble famous people. The owner has a surplus of eggplants shaped like Conroy Bumpus, and will actually sculpt a vegetable in the shape of anyone you have a picture of, both facts that come in handy later.
  • Another attraction you visit in the course of the game is Frog Rock, which much to the disappointment of the Freelance Police barely looks like a frog at all.
    Max: My innocence has been shattered by this blatant tourist trap. I want my money back!
    Sam: You didn't pay anything.
    Max: Well, somebody better give me some money.

Visual Novels

• Shelley de Killer from Ace Attorney once testified on the witness stand through a radio. The radio has some features that resemble de Killer himself, such as its dial resembling his monocle. Interestingly, the radio is actually more expressive than de Killer is. The same goes for his appearance in the second Ace Attorney Investigations, where an ice cream cone he carries resembles his face, with a cherry serving as the monocle.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner:
  • In "Where's The Cheat?", Marzipan notices Homestar made her vegetarian burger so it looks like a face and decides it's too cute to eat. She names it Homestar Jr. and spends the rest of the episode talking to it as if it were her son.
  • Strong Bad Email: An Easter Egg in the episode "pop up" features an aerial photo of Manicouagan Reservoir in Quebec that looks surprisingly similar to Strong Sad's head.^contextAs a riff on a cheap sound chip that makes Strong Bad's catchphrase "Deleted!" sound like "the lake head".

Web Comics

• In Homestuck, Jade tries out her Pictionary Modus (which creates an item based on what it thinks her drawing is) by drawing a casual, loopy doodle. The Modus interprets it as being the face of actor Charles Dutton. This becomes a Running Gag.

Web Original

• The Onion has a slideshow entitled "Ten Sandwiches That Look Like British Novelist Martin Amis," The joke is that they're all photos of Martin Amis himself, with captions claiming that they're sandwiches.

Web Video

• Vsauce: Discussed in "Spooky Coincidences?" where Michael calls it by the formal term pareidolia. Examples he list include hearing your name in the sound of running water, hearing English words in a song That's not English, and seeing faces that weren't intended to look like faces.

Western Animation

• Bob's Burgers: In "The Quirkducers", Linda becomes somewhat obsessed with "Grandpa Potato", a potato shaped liked the head of her Grandpa Bert.
• The Simpsons:
  • A newspaper article in "Radio Bart" features a squirrel resembling Abraham Lincoln.
  • A bunch of beans are said to resemble The Leader of a cult in "The Joy of Sect".
  • When Marge's aunt died in "Selma's Choice", she left Marge her prized collection of potato chips that looked like celebrities, like Jay Leno and Otto Von Bismark. Unfortunately, Homer ate all of them during the viewing of the video will.
• An episode of WordGirl has Becky seeking a pinecone resembling Lincoln as part of a scavenger hunt she's participating in.
• In Recess, T.J. is granted a corn chip in the shape of Lincoln's head for a perceived act of heroism due to his shiner. He hallucinates that the chip is talking to him and Honest Abe is saying he should tell the truth about how he got his black eye.
• Chuckie of Rugrats couldn't sleep because of monsters under his bed. It wasn't a scary, hungry monster under Chuckie's bed, but a colorful sweater curled in such a way that looked like a monster enough to even make Chaz flinch.
• The characters in The Weekenders go to a museum every week to sample ethnic foods. One time when sampling Andean potatoes, one of them found a potato that resembled their friend Lor. Lor didn't see the resemblance but took offense when the potato was eaten.
• Shake and Carl on Aqua Teen Hunger Force once tried to make a money-making venture out of an oil stain on Carl's driveway that looked like Jesus. It didn't take off.
• In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Unfair Science Fair Redux", Candace accidentally becomes Queen of Mars, and the native martians sculpt the Face on Mars (see below) in her likeness. Unfortunately, it gets zapped by one of Dr. Doofenshmirtz's old -inators before she can show it to her mother and ends up looking more like "a rhesus monkey wearing a powdered wig" to Linda.
• Gravity Falls:
  • One of Grunkle Stan's attractions is the Rock-that-Looks-Like-a-Face Rock, the rock that looks like a face. People are having trouble telling whether it is a rock or a face.
  • This is taken to such a length that in "Not What He Seems", secret agents are so distracted by the question, they completely ignore Mabel and Dipper slipping into the house.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Owing to the fanbase's habit of slapping a name and characterization on every single background character, we finally got Frowny. As it turns out, Frowny likes to read.
  • There's also a steam gauge from "Applejack's Day Off", which even has its own character tag on the booru.
• The Critic: When Jay adopted a stray puppy he found, he came home to find that the dog had ransacked his fridge while he was at work. One of the foods that were gone was a waffle shaped like Jesus.
  Jay: I also had a motza shaped like Moses! If that's not kosher, what is?
• Bordertown: When J.C is deported to Mexico, he gets annoyed at a group of people who claim that the Virgin Mary has appeared in their tortilla. Much to his shock, she actually IS in the tortilla. Apparently she likes Mexican food.
• Ready Jet Go!: In "Moon Face", Dr. Skelley teaches Sean and Sydney that you can see faces on everyday objects. They proceed to envision faces on the objects around them.
• Moral Orel: The episode "Holy Visage" parodies the Looks Like Jesus examples when a doctor sustains a grisly wound in His image. The audience can tell that it's not a true miracle, as the wound was caused by a Jesus bobble-head, but the people of Moralton don't, and prevent the wound from getting treatment.

Real Life

• Jesus's Face has been reported found in toasted bread.
• The Face of Mars, which Viking I took pictures of in the 1970s, turns out to be just a mountain with some shadows. This didn't stop rampant speculation about a humanoid civilization that may have lived on Mars.
• The Old Man of the Mountain was a famous New Hampshire rock formation that resembled a human face in profile, when viewed from the north. The formation, which was famous enough to go on the New Hampshire state quarter, collapsed in 2003.
• The Badlands Guardian is a natural geomorphological feature near Medicine Hat, Alberta that, when viewed from above, resembles a human head wearing a Native American chief's headdress, facing directly westward.
• The Man in the Moon, as well as the Moon Rabbit.
• On July 13th, 2015, the first clear images of the dwarf planet Pluto were taken and sent to earth. They showed a large light-colored area with two obvious 'lobes' that was quickly dubbed "Pluto's Heart". It was later officially named the Tombaugh Regio after the discoverer of Pluto, but people are more likely to know it as the Heart.
• It's thought that the original trolls (who turn to stone in daylight) were imagined by people seeing rock formations that looked humanoid.
• Automobile manufacturers/designers are well aware of this trope and how people tend to see a "face" on the front of cars (with the headlights as eyes). They've actually started taking this into account in the aesthetics of the design: some cars are meant to look "friendly" or "cool" or "angry" based on the image the company is trying to project for the product.
• Certain face recognition/detection software tend to make false positives — where, if you squint just enough, said false positive kind of does... well, look like a face.
• The UNIVAC 1◊ computer's tape deck looks sort of like a screaming human face.
• Certain cuts of wood seem to have faces in them.
• Chichibu, Japan is home to Chinsekikan, or the Hall of Curious Stones. It's home to hundreds of rocks that look like faces (or jinmenseki), including some that bear a resemblance to celebrities and fictional characters.
• A species of Japanese crab has a shell that looks like a human face, and tradition hold that they are the reincarnation of warriors from a bygone war.
• Round windows can sometimes look like eyes, making buildings appear to have faces. A well-known example is the "Church of the Confused Chicken", in Madeira Beach, Florida.

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