The Uncanny Valley trend is a popular make-up trend circling the internet. The trend depicts makeup artists covering parts of their facial features, like the edges of their eyelashes, making their eyes look smaller and emphasizing their cheekbones, making them look plastic-like. The artist then hides in the shadows, stares, and smiles at the camera. This incites an uncanny feeling, which is defined by Oxford Definitions as a weird or unsettling feeling.

This uneasy feeling achieved by the trend is called the Uncanny Valley. According to IEEE Spectrum, the concept of the Uncanny Valley was first introduced in the 1970’s by a Japanese roboticist, Masahiro Mori. Mori would make face molds to put on robots. He revealed that people like realistic faces if they actually look realistic on robots. If the face seemed off or looked too realistic, they had a weird, uneasy feeling or possibly panicked.

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A graph of the human perception of reality as related to the Uncanny Valley.

The unsettling feeling comes from humans’ ability or inability to recognize a face. The graph that represents the Uncanny Valley shows that humans recognize faces up until a point where the line drops, creating a valley. That point is where the human brain doesn’t recognize the face as human, which is what the trend simulates. This causes a weird feeling in the viewer’s mind.

The reasoning behind this phenomenon is still uncertain. Although there are still a few theories, Very Well Mind suggests a few theories, like it being a survival response to things that could threaten life, or a disease. Others say it could be confusion of what category to sort the face into: living or nonliving. Another theory is that it stems from the inconsistency in facial features. Some of the smallest differences in a robotic face can trigger the feeling. Mori suggested that it could be the speed at which the robot smiled that looks wrong. 

Regardless of the reasoning behind the Uncanny Valley, the makeup trend has proven its existence with an unsettling after feeling. The Uncanny Valley is also common in horror movies and sometimes older CGI when editing was weirder. Although the phenomenon still can’t be explained, people still find it intriguing and fun to experiment with, while others still continue to get a little creeped out after watching.